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University Microfilms International 300 N. ZEEB RD„ ANN ARBOR, Ml 48106 8129081

R h o d e s , M ary

DRIED FLOWERS: THE HISTORY OF WOMEN’S CULTURE AT COTTEY COLLEGE, 1884-1965

The Ohio State University Ph.D. 1981

University Microfilms I n te r n 8ti 0 n 8 ! 300 N. Zeeb Road, Ann Arbor, M I 48106

Copyright 1981 by Rhodes, Mary All Rights Reserved DRIED FLOWERS; THE HISTORY OF WOMEN'S CULTURE

AT COTTEY COLLEGE, 1884-1965

DISSERTATION

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for

the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate

School of The Ohio State University

by

Mary Rhodes, B.A., M.A.

*****

The Ohio State University

1981

Reading Committee: Approved By

Leila J. Rupp

Robert H. Bremner

Warren R. Van Tine a ;UQi' Adviser Department of History For

Patricia M. Rhodes

and

My former students at Cottey College

n ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This work results from contributions by many individuals and organizations for which I am most grateful. For the final product I bear full responsibility.

My special thanks to my mother, Patricia M. Rhodes, and my broth­ er, John Mark Rhodes, for their encouragement and support through the years devoted to this study.

I am especially grateful to Dr. Leila J. Rupp for her interest in my topic, her faith in its inherent integrity, and her patient review and professional guidance as I struggled to chisel this piece of women's history from the sources.

To Dr. Robert H. Bremner, I extend my thanks for his encourage­ ment and direction in the early stages of my study.

To Dr. Warren R. Van Tine I am thankful for his challenges to probe deeper into the sources.

For permission to use the Cottey College Archives, I thank the

Board of Trustees of Cottey College.

For support during the years of my study I thank—

The Department of History at The Ohio State University for a

i i i graduate teaching associateship.

The Center for Women's Studies at The Ohio State University for a graduate teaching associateship.

The Board of Trustees of Cottey College for a sabbatical leave.

The P. E. 0. Sisterhood.

To my friends, B. J. and Dave Heck, I extend my heartfelt thanks for their encouragement and for innumerable dishes of ice cream along the way.

To Anne Turner Simpson, Mary Jo Heck, and Elizabeth Ann Heck King- seed I say thank you for awakening and perpetuating my interest in women's history.

My special thanks to my friend and roommate, Revathi Balakrishnan, who stood by me through thickest and thinnest and whose unwavering support and faith enabled me to complete this study.

IV VITA

21 January 1941. . . Born - Marion, Kansas

1961 ...... A. A., Colorado Women's College, Denver, Colorado

1964 ...... B. A., University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas

1965-1967 .... Constituent Correspondent and Researcher, Office of U. S. Senator James B. Pearson, Washington, D. C.

1967-1968 .... Instructor in History, College of the Ozarks, Clarksville, Arkansas

1970 ...... M. A., University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia

1968-1980 .... Instructor in History; Assistant Professor of History; Faculty Member in History and Coor­ dinator of Academic Records, Cottey College, Nevada, Missouri

1980 ...... Graduate Teaching Associate, Department of History, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio

1981 ...... Graduate Teaching Associate, Center for Women's Studies, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio

1980- ...... Administrative Director, Ohio Conference, American Association of University Professors. Columbus, Ohio

PUBLICATIONS

Themes in American Religion and P o litics, Student Manual, 2 vols., and Study Guide, coauthored with Virginia M. Roberts. Nevada, Missouri: Cottey College, 1973. FIELDS OF STUDY

Major Field: History of the United States

Social History of the United States. Professors Leila J. Rupp and Warren R. Vanline

Intellectual History of the United States. Professor Robert H. Bremner

Nineteenth Century History of the United States. Professor Harry Coles

Nineteenth Century History of Europe. Professor Carol Rogel.

VI TABLE OF CONTENTS

DEDICATION...... ii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... i i i

VITA ...... V

Chapter

I. INTRODUCTION ...... 1

I I . THE GROWTH OF WOMEN'S CULTURE IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY ...... 7

I I I . WOMEN'S CULTURE AND WOMEN'S INSTITUTION BUILDING AT COTTEY COLLEGE...... 42

IV. THE FLOWERING OF WOMEN'S CULTURE AT COTTEY COLLEGE...... 97

V. THE DECLINE OF WOMEN'S CULTURE AT COTTEY COLLEGE . . 143

VI. CONCLUSION: WHY WOMEN'S CULTURE DECLINED AT COTTEY COLLEGE ...... 192

BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 205

VII CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

Looking back on what historian Mary R itter Beard terms "long history"—an overview of cultural trends since prehistoric times--we glimpse woemn's contributions to the creation of civilization--a de­ velopment, she said, which distinguished human culture from the wild beasts. "Of what did this sharp distinction consist?" Beard asked.

Of cooking, making cloth, devising hand-made shelter, manufacturing domestic utensils of pottery and baskets for garnering seeds and grain, extending the diet and making meals attractive, budgeting the food supply, learning essentials about doctoring and nursing, mak­ ing animals serve human beings, enlarging the communication of feelings or ideas by speech, song, and dance, and tillin g the soil.

Through the centuries gender roles gradually shifted in the d ir­

ection of increasing control by men and decreasing control by women

over production, and at the same time increasing emphasis on women's

reproductive role as their major contribution to the community or 2 society. The shift in gender roles is referred to in this paper as

"masculinization." By the end of the nineteenth century, primary con­

trol over nearly a ll of the areas Beard defined as women's concern was

in the hands of men. The struggle for control of the environment

through ca p italist, industrial, monetary and m ilitary means which typi­

fied the dominant culture of men's values had virtu ally climaxed in

1 2 the United States, lomen s t ill retained control, however, of their own culture--a culture separate from that of men--but by the mid­ twentieth century even women's culture was overpowered by men's insatiable appetite for control.

In this study women's culture is viewed within the context of the general nineteenth century American culture, 'lomen's culture is taken as a system of values adopted by women, operative within the dominant, pervasive culture which was based on values adopted by men.

I w ill discuss the changing relationship of the two cultures in nineteenth century America as depicted at a women's college. The pre­ vailing system of men's values, which I w ill refer to as the dominant or general cutlure, permeated v irtu ally a ll p o litic a l, economic and social systems and institutions. Women's culture, which interacted with the dominant culture, expressed different values in women's poli­ tic a l, economic and social systems and institutions. Men's values in the dominant culture focussed on control of the environment, a com­ prehensive term which includes a ll aspects of nature and of human lif e . The instrument of environmental control was organization, whe­ ther i t be organization of nature through science and technology or organization of human life through such structures as industries, transportation systems, constitutions, laws, political parties, religious doctrines, educational institutions, or the family. The strength of any organizational form ultimately rested on some ele­ ment of power. Men's sphere imposed on individual males the culture- bound expectation to establish a circle of control through organization 3 and power. The dimensions of that circle of control varied from man to man but v irtu a lly always included control of one or more women.

Women, then, were part of men's controlled environment. Whe­ ther viewed as controlled by one man or by larger, man-made systems and institutions, women existed within the dominant culture. Within this dominant culture women's culture expressed two basic values--woman's autonomy, and the value of human lif e —in three theatres: 1) the en­ vironment immediate to the individual in which women adopted modes of behavior which enabled them to cope with or celebrate their surround­ ings or to survive from day to day; 2) the enviornment beyond women's sphere to which women extended th eir influence through humanistic melioration of existing conditions; and 3) women's institutions in which women defined and shaped the environment according to their values and principles. The women's educational institution with which this study is concerned fa lls essentially in the la tte r category a l­ though the other theatres of women's culture also relate to the main

topic. Woman's autonomy was a key value of women's culture in re­

sponse to men's intense concern for control of a ll elements of the

environment including women. Only with some degree of autonomy could

women strive for betterment of human lif e , a value which sharply con­

trasted with men's value of control for the sake of control and power.

To understand the long history of women's contributions to c iv ili­

zation, we must study women's culture—v/hat Gerda Lerner calls "the

ground upon which women stand in their resistance to patriarchal domi- 3 nance and their assertion of their own creativity in shaping society." 4

And to achieve an understanding of women's culture the historian must use gender as a means of historical analysis in a ll contexts and from that point build the larger historical picture.^ Women's culture can­ not be consigned, as some historians contend, to merely "part of the dominant system, sharing most of its assumptions about women and men— c separate spheres, women's domesticity, male dominance." Nor did women's culture merely express their reactions to male power through protest, resentment, disapproval, fear and accommodation.^ I t is de­ ceptive reasoning to assert that women's culture resulted from conflict with men,^ for value differences must antedate any such conflict-- values must be articulated before conflict can be recognized. Study of women's culture, taken as the values upon which women made deci­ sions, is inclusive of feminism. Feminism was born of women's values, of women's culture. Women's culture was not the scraps from off men's table, i t was not fringes and soft embellishments to the dominant cul­ ture. The fact that men dominated the national economy and politics did not mean that men dominated women's culture. Women's culture had a source and existence within women untainted by men. It is with the expression of women's cultural values in higher education that this study is concerned. Referring to the study of women's higher educa­ tion, Patricia A. Palmieri projects the need to study women's colleges within the "complex cultural context. . . which should include analy­ ses of industrialization, urbanization, demographic patterns, marriage

rates, and class ideology. . . Although her itemization—except

for class ideology—refers only to material culture, by implication

Palmieri suggests the need to place the study of women's institutions in a context of cultural values.

This study looks at women's culture from the perspective of a unique women's college. Cottey College, established in 1884 by

Virginia Alice Cottey, was perpetuated after 1927 by an international women's organization which also originated in the late nineteenth cen­ tury, the P. E. 0. Sisterhood. Developments at Cottey in its fir s t 80 years indicate that the women's culture which thrived in its first half century gradually but steadily yielded to the penetration of men's cul­ tural values until virtu ally complete masculinization was accomplished by 1965. Other women's institutions and women's culture in general experienced similar take-overs. Some of the results of this decline of women's culture—a decline which culminated in the post-World War

Two society--are described by Betty Friedan in The Feminine Mystique published in 1963.^

I begin the study of women's culture at Cottey College in Chapter

I I by defining and placing women's culture in the context of the nine­

teenth century, briefly summarizing the development of women's higher

education, and describing the origins of the P. E. 0. Sisterhood. With

this framework established I look, in Chapter III, at the origins of

Cottey College and the nature of women's culture at the college in its

early years. Chapter IV describes the flowering of women's culture at

Cottey into the 1930s and Chapter V describes the process by which

women's culture at Cottey gradually was subsumed by the dominant cul­

ture of men's values. Chapter VI shows how the decline of women's

culture at Cottey College reflects trends in the larger society. NOTES FOR CHAPTER I

1. Mary R itter Beard, Woman as Force in History, (New York: Collier Books, 1946), pp. 284-285.

2. For an interpretation of gender role changes, 1700-1950, see, for example, Louise A. T illy and Joan W. Scott, Women, Work, and Family, (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1978).

3. Gerda Lerner, "Politics and Culture in Women's History," Feminist Studies, 6:1 (Spring 1980), p. 53.

4. Linda Gordon, "What Should Women's Historians Do: P olitics, Social Theory and Women's History," Radical History Review.

5. Ellen DuBois, "Politics and Culture in Women's History," Feminist Studies, 6:1 (Spring 1980), p. 30.

6. Barbara Leslie Epstein, The Politics of Domesticity: Women, Evan­ gelism, and Temperance in Nineteenth-Century America, (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1981), p. 9.

7. Epstein, Politics, p. 9.

8. "Paths and P itfa lls : Illuminating Women's Educational History," review of Collegiate Women" Domesticity and Career in Turn-of-the-Cen- tury America by Roberta Frankfort, Harvard Educational Review, 49:4 (November 1979), p. 538.

9. Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, (New York: Dell Publishing Company, In c., 1963). CHAPTER I I

THE GROWTH OF WOMEN'S CULTURE IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

Nineteenth century U. S. social history is comprehensible only i f considered from the distinctive perspectives of the two primary cul­ tural groups which made up the social fabric—women and men. While class and race reflect very definite cultural groups in American so­ ciety, gender distinctions permeate even these broad categories. Early

in the nineteenth century gender distinctions assumed new importance as means of rationalizing the social fabric in the emerging industrial age. In the pre-industrial age, "the basic differences between men and women meshed in a harmonious division of labor," but in d u striali­ zation and growth of cities "made the sexes adversaries."^

Industrialization underscored economic justification of social prac­

tices based on gender differences, and added to older, traditional

rationale for gender differentiation in social institutions, fortified

the emergent Victorian cult of domesticity.

By giving all women the same natural vocation, the cannon of domesticity classed them a ll together. . . . But in the attempt to raise a democratic culture almost all types of classification had to be rejected, except the "natural" ones such as sex (and race) and the achieved ones such as "self-made" wealth. The division of spheres supplied an acceptable kind of social dis­ tinction. Sex, not class, was the basic category.

Thus, "by assimilating diverse personalities to one work-role that was

also a sex-role signifying a shared and special destiny," the cannon

7 8 of domesticity intensified women's gender-group identification. 3

Just as Victorians recognized the separate spheres of the two

sexes, so the historian must divorce women's culture from men's cul­

ture to achieve an understanding of women's history in the Victorian

era. Only then can women's and men's histories be rewoven to achieve

a more re alistic appreciation of the past. Because the object of this

study is to trace women's culture in a women's college i t is important

to begin with a working concept of women's culture as separate and

distinct from the dominant culture of men's values, while at the same

time remembering that the dominant culture very much affected every

woman by subjugating her tnrough sexual politics and economic exploi­

tation. Typically, the general nineteenth century culture severely

restricted a woman's p o litic a l, economic and legal spheres, and even

intruded upon her in te lle c t. But beyond the restrictive male defin i­

tions of her existence, at some point in her inner core a woman

carried her own woman-defined identity. Beyond the male values in the

world in which she lived and with which she contended, the woman-

identified-woman selected and acted upon her own values and in this

she was not subjugated by the dominant culture. Women's values emerg­

ed not in reaction to male values but in response to women's inner

motives. The collective nature of women's values and of women's ac­

tions based on these values form the basis of women's culture, and i t

is this culture which gradually is emerging from decades of historical

neglect. 9

This chapter describes the emergence of women's culture as a fie ld of historical inquiry separate from culture defined in male-based terms. I t then elaborates in detail the two primary values of women's culture--woman's autonomy and the value of human life --in the nine­ teenth century context, and places the P. E. 0. Sisterhood within this context. The chapter ends with a brief discussion of issues raised concerning women's higher education as that education appeared to challenge values of the dominant culture. The chapter thus establish­ es the historical context for discussion of women's culture and women's education relevant to Cottey College and the P. E. 0. Sisterhood which follow in the ensuing chapters.

In light of the p o litic a l, economic and legal subjugation of women, historians long have treated women as though they had no signi­

ficant existence of their own. Women were footnotes to white man's

civilization. Those historians who dealt with women at all generally

considered their subject in relation to male p o litic a l, economic and

legal systems. For decades, historian Mary R itter Beard stood fast in

her concern for women's history, and she significantly challenged the

suffrage-orientation of women's history which viewed women as an op­

pressed group in relation to the male p o litical system. Beard

contended that women are not oppressed "but that they have made a con­

tinuous and impressive contribution to society throughout all of

history."^ Her major work. Woman as Force in History, however,

attempted to show the significance of women's participation with men 5 in wars, revolutions and other notable occasions of the past. Thus, 10 she never really established a firm definition of women's culture.

Although she refused to admit women's subjugation and sometimes over­ stated her case, Beard was important for her persistence in promoting the cause of women's history and her efforts to have i t recognized in the intellectual community.

Twenty years after publication of Woman as Force in History an­ other historian took up the cause Beard had defined. Gerda Lerner recognized Beard's limitations and developed the definition of women's history from where Beard had le ft i t . "In a very real sense," Lerner said, "I consider Mary Beard, whom I never met, as my principle mentor as a historian."^ Unwilling to accept androcentric definitions of women, Lerner probed for female uniqueness in historical relationships although she, too, had d iffic u lty in freeing her mind from the grasp of male institutions. In 1969, using Beard's model, she described women's use of the male political power structure.

My research has led me to believe that A/omen/ wielded considerable power--in the middle of the 19th century even po litical power. They found a way to make their power f e lt through organizations, through pressure tactics, through petitioning, and various other means; these later became models for other mass movements for reform.

As she continued her analysis of history, she suggested that histor­ ians should distinguish the ideas society held of women's proper p place--and just what woman's place actually was. In "The Lady and the M ill Girl" she not only distinguished the different effects of in­ dustrial iztion on men and on women, but also on women of different

Û classes. In this and other works, Lerner added gender to the 11 traditional categories social historians use for analysis—class, race, religion, nationality.

By 1974, however, she realized that

What we call women's history may actually be the study of a separate women's culture. Such a culture would include not only the separate occupations, status, experiences, and rituals of women but also their con­ sciousness, which internalizes patriarchal assumptions. In some cases, i t would include the tension created in the culture between the prescribed patriarchal assump­ tions and women's efforts to attain autonomy and emancipation.

This, at la s t, expressed the object of Beard's historical inquiry

better even than Beard had expressed i t , and i t is this concern for women's culture which Lerner urged on the historical profession. To

rectify the androcentric monopoly on history, she said,

we must. . . focus on a woman-centered inquiry, con­ sidering the possibility of the existence of a female culture within the general culture shared by men and women. History must include an account of the female experience over time and should include the develop­ ment of feminist consciousness as an essential aspect of women's past. This is the primary task of women's history. The central question it raises is: What would history be lik e i f i t were seen through the. eyes of women and ordered by values they define?

I t is this question raised by Lerner to which the present study re­

sponds.

Nineteenth century women's culture was housed within that part of

the world women occupied, often referred to as th eir sphere. The

Cult of True Womanhood which Barbara Welter found expressed in women's

magazines, g ift annuals and religious lite ra tu re , defined the param- 12 eters of that sphere. Purity, piety, submissiveness and domesticity 12 described social expectations for women and thereby set limitations on their self-expression and actions. Whereas the dominant culture was oriented toward the economic system with particular emphasis on con­ trol of the environment and resources to gain money and power, women's culture, as their sphere, was defined in non-economic terms. As various elements of home production were removed from the home and placed in male-controlled factories, the dominant culture increasingly tended to consider the home in non-economic terms.

The cannon of domesticity expressed the dominance of what may be designated a middle-class ideal, a cul­ tural preference for domestic retirement and conjugal-family intimacy over both the "vain"' and fashionable sociability of the rich and the promiscuous sociability of the poor.

Gender-based social polarity in the industrial era reinforced

traditionally distinct worlds for women and men. Women's sphere be­

came virtually a world of women, while contact with men was structured

according to social expectations specified by the dominant culture.

Every important event in a woman's lif e cycle—from girlhood to, mar­

riage, childbirth, and death--was institutionalized by women's

homosocial networks in social conventions or ritu a ls , 'lomen validated

other women's lives and in the process created bonds of sisterhood

which permeated women's culture.It was the focus of women on

women's world or sphere from which women's culture emerged as a dis­

tinct social force within the nineteenth century dominant culture.

Women's culture focussed on two fundamental values--woman's auto­

nomy and the value of human lif e . These interrelated values were 13 richly expressed on an individual level through women's relations with other women and with men. Women also structured their culture with informal and formal reform efforts to meliorate inhumane conditions in the environment beyond women's sphere, and with the creation of women's institutions which shaped the environment to women's specifications.

The following analysis describes women's culture as i t was expressed in the nineteenth century. Autonomy, as used in this study, refers to the individual's self-chosen identity and self-sufficiency as a person.

Some expressions of autonomy in women's culture are found in woman's control of her own body, in her relationships with other women, and in her escape from men's culture through involvement in religious a c ti­ vities. Some expressions of autonomy simply enabled women to cope with their immediate environment and to survive from day to day whereas other forms expressed women's creativity.

In a fundamental expression of their autonomy, women controlled their own bodies, in part by controlling th eir physical accessibility or a v aila b ility to men. Whereas men's sphere centered on economics and p o litics, women's sphere focussed on domesticity, and "men materially benefited from this arrangement by refocusing more attention on the marketplace,/h\xÿ women in turn could wield some power by controlling 1 R their physical accessibility." Women's continence, or "passionless­ ness," originated in their resistence to the double standard. In the early nineteenth century, "Only a handful of New England women. . . questioned the political inequalities of their situation, but sexual and marital subjection--unequal sexual prerogatives--seem to have 14 rankled a much larger population."^® Passionlessness was women's mode of asserting their autonomy over their bodies.

In sexual encounters women had more than an even chance to lose, whether by censure under the double standard, unwanted pregnancy and health problems, or ill-fa te d marriage. In this perspective women might hail passion­ lessness as a way to assert control in the sexual arena --even i f that "control" consisted in denial.

Women's assertion of autonomy through control of th eir bodies and reproduction was a common phenomenon throughout the century. Although the feminist movement was s p lit into many organizations by 1870, a unifying issue for most of the groups was birth control or "voluntary 18 motherhood." Advocates of voluntary motherhood generally rejected contraceptive devices as a rtific ia l and unnatural methods to their end, and instead "they recommended periodic or permanent abstinence . . . ."19

Women's cultural value of control over their bodies often was undermined by pressures from husbands or the social expectations of others. The effect of these pressures to force women's compliance to behavioral standards set by persons other than the women themselves at times resulted in exaggerated resistence by the women being pressur­ ed. Domestic role alternatives for women were few and rig id ly defined and placed women in a conflict of externally imposed values. Whereas they were expected to be passive, nurturant, emotional, pious and child-like, in actuality they had to be strong, self-reliant and ef­ ficient caretakers. Unable to satisfy the conflicting demands on their behavior, some women adapted to the pressure with exaggerations of role 15 expectations Imposed on them. In their hysteria they became overly

Of) dependent, fra g ile , emotional and narcissistic.

Women's autonomous control of their own bodies often was not achieved, but i t remained a basic value of women's culture and con­ tributed to another expression of their autonomy, sisterhood. The passionlessness which women adopted to avoid sexual encounters with men at the same time contributed to "sexual solidarity among women" and allowed them "to consider their love relationships with one another of higher character than heterosexual relationships because they ex- 21 eluded (male) carnal passion." Women withdrew from intimate contact with men to their fam iliar female world. Withdrawal was not necessar­ ily a matter of h o stility to men but rather an aspect of the rigid gender-role differentiation which characterized the family and society as a whole and which led "to the emotional segregation of women and 22 men." The sisterhood which historian Carroll Smith-Rosenberg iden­ tifie d considered men as the out-group and created for women a safe world which nurtured inner security and self-esteem and discouraged criticism of and hostility toward other women. It was a sisterhood which was in itiated between mother and daughter and which extended in varying form through ritu a l and daily experience throughout the female life cycle.

The fir s t step away from her mother when a g irl entered school led 24 to a new circle of friends and formation of new sisterhood alliances.

Young women quite commonly established loving relationships with other young women. A le tte r to the Yale Courant in 1872 described the 16 ritual whereby one woman wooed another with flowers, candy, love notes and other marks of attention "until at last the object of her atten­ tions is captured, the two become inseparable, and the aggressor is pc considered by her circle of acquaintances as--smashed. " At Wel­ lesley College,

close relationships flourished between the students and some of the women faculty--an understandable phenomenon, since they were together under the same roof twenty-four hours a day, were nearly the same age, and fe lt a communion not only as innovators for women, but as opponents ofgthe rigid rules by which the college was governed.

Strong attachments between women continued after school or college days were past. "Intimate, supportive relationships with a high de­ gree of emotional, sensual, and even sexual content existed freely 27 among both single and married women in America." Such relationships, defined and nurtured by women, clearly express one aspect of nine­ teenth century women's autonomy, although public acceptance of women's 28 public relationships altered noticeably after the mid-1870s.

Changing public attitudes, however, as numerous historians have shown, 29 did not eliminate women's love for other women. "Jane Addams and

L illia n Wald /settlement house founder^/ were involved almost exclu­ sively with women who remained throughout their lives a nurturing source of love and support," and Crystal Eastman's women friends "con­ sidered men splendid lovers and friends, but they believed that women needed the more egalitarian support of otherwomen.Eastman, a feminist and peace advocate in the early twentieth century, and other women actively sought and depended upon the friendship, love and 17 support of other women. In the case of Wald, philanthropist Grace

Dodge, labor leaders Leonora O'Reilley and Rose Schneiderman, and suffragist and social welfare leader Maude Nathan,

Work, cause, social change became extraordinarily important. . . . For a ll of them work was the dominant activity of adult lif e . Consequently, a ll five women tended to seek personal relationships that would support their work and tried to avoid ones that might interfere with it. . . .

For many women i t was the sense of a separate community with other women that enabled them to survive in a difficult and often hostile 32 world. Men often were perceived as disinterested in women's a c ti­ vities. The loving, nurturing relationships of women-identified- women, on the other hand, in itiated at mother's knee and perpetuated throughout women's lif e cycle, formed the bedrock of women's culture.

Just as women found safe harbor in other women's love and friend­ ship, so too did some find sanctuary in religion. In this regard, a brief description of women's use of religious shrines in another nation w ill help illuminate the situation in nineteenth century

America. Fatima Mernissi studied the function of religious shrines in twentieth century North Africa. The sanctuaries, she said, serve as

"an informal women's association" in which

the locus of anti establishment, anti patriarchal mythical figures, provide women with a space where complaint and verbal vituperations against the system's injustices are allowed and encouraged. They give women the opportunity to develop c ri­ tical views of their conditions, to^identify problems, and to try to find their solution.

The sanctuary is a refuge for women which men enter only b riefly. It

offers "a dramatic contrast to /women's/ subordinate position in a 18 bureaucratie, patriarchal society where decisionmaking positions are held by men." Mernissi found that the North African shrines serve as a safety valve for women's discontent and that women's hostile c riti- 34 cism of their environment is not permitted outside the sanctuaries.

Within the walls of the sanctuary women are permitted to ra il openly against aspects of the dominant culture outside the sanctuary which they find abusive. With th eir complaints thus aired in the holy atmosphere, and appeals made to appropriate religious powers, women leave the sanctuary and re-enter the dominant culture with acceptance of their situation, satisfied that they have appealed to the highest possible authority over the heads of those in the dominant culture who oppress them, and that somehow their grievances w ill be rectified .

In nineteenth century America, religion served as a focus of sisterhood for some women and as a safety valve for others. Dis­ establishment of the churches in the early part of the century reduced the influence of religion in the dominant culture. Emphasis shifted from doctrinal interpretation to direct emotional experience with a greater emphasis on the personal lif e and "intimate love relationships 35 between human beings and God." The changed image of Christ por­ trayed characteristics with which women readily identified.

I f Christ was interpreted as a human dominated by love, sacrificing himself for others, asking no­ thing but giving everything and forgiving his enemies in the bargain, he was playing the same role as the true woman in a number of typical nineteenth-century melodramatic scenarios.

The tie between women and religious institutions grew stronger as men

found more--and women found fewer--opportunities for instituitonal 19 involvement with the progressive industrialization of America. "Be­ sides their prominence during services, women increasingly handled the voluntary societies. . . by teaching Sunday school, distributing 37 tracts, and working for missions." The large numbers of women con­ verts in the Second Great Awakening (C. 1790-1835) belie a desire among women for more than institutional involvement, however. As women came to outnumber men in individual church groups, "religious activities can. be seen as means used by New England women to define 38 self and find community. ..." It was the possibilities of autono­ mous expression in religious matters, and unity with like-minded women, which made the churches an important part of women's culture in the nineteenth century. These values made the churches focal points for many reform programs which women undertook.

Churches were centers of sisterhood for some women whereas for others churches served as safety valves on the order described by

Mernissi. Christian Science, founded by Mary Baker Eddy, took no part

in reform efforts. "On the contrary, the doctrine denied social reality altogether. ..." But "by building an enclave in which female and male sex roles were less rigid ly defined and more egalitarian than

in the outside world," Christian Science

created a separate organizational world for women .... At the same time, i t is important to note that the social system its e lf was scarcely i f at all disrupted; hence. . . Christian Science may have contributed to the equilibrium of the very same social order that gave the movement its initial impetus and latent functions. 20

With emphasis on the individual for her own chosen identity, women's culture created structures and relationships within which the individual woman was protected, cherished, nurtured and heard. Pas­ sionlessness and birth control assured women of means, alb eit imperfect means, to control their bodies. In desperation, some women resorted to hysterical symptoms as a means to protect not only their bodies but their personhood. Hysterical women were a symptom of the culturally induced stress women endured in nineteenth century America. Women celebrated their autonomy and personhood with a vast array of rela­ tionships gathered under the umbrella of sisterhood. The safety and nurturance found in individual relationships extended to a concept of women's community. Such a communal s p irit wove through the lives of noted reformers as well as through the churches which women populated so heavily. And just as hysteria provided re lie f for the woman under unbearable stress, so Christian Science and other religious groups provided a safety valve for women's tensions without disrupting the larger soceity. Notwithstanding these safety valves, however, some women stove to a lte r their environment or to build women's institutions which preferred broader opportunities to express women's culture.

Extension of women's influence outside their sphere presented additional opportunities for expression of women's values. At times

individuals simply attempted to moderate the environment through their

influence as school teachers. At other times, however, women dramati­ cally attempted to establish humanistic principles on a wider scale.

Women's organizations and other women's institutions were intimately 21 involved in the process of extending women's culture.

Early in the nineteenth century women in New York City formed the

New York Female Moral Reform Society to convert prostitutes and to ad­ vocate moral perfection. The organization later expanded to become the American Female Moral Reform Society. By siding with the pros­ titutes against male lechery, i t "gave its members a sense of female solidarity, a sense of worthiness and autonomy outside women's tra­ ditionally confining role."^®

The key to this esprit de corps. . . was a deep-seated h o stility toward men, toward their violation of the Seventh Commandment, and, as w ell, toward their », superior position in the home and in society generally.

This and other benevolent societies permitted women to perform their traditional welfare functions outside the home, and women eagerly participated in a great variety of efforts to humanize their environ- 42 ment. For one, by participating in the abolition movement they worked not only to eliminate slavery but to promote better conditions 43 for women as well. And, with the coming of the Civil War, large numbers of women participated in the United States Sanitary Commission.

There, as in the abolition movement, they learned the necessity and 44 the practical methods for bringing human comfort to the suffering.

In the post-Civil War period.

The agenda now reflected (as i t had not before) a determination to transform institutions and organizations in the s p irit of feminine virtues, and to protect and preserve the purity and respect­ ability of all women, ....

Building on Civil War experiences which paralleled the U. S. Sanitary 2 2

Commission's mission, Clara Barton established the American Red

Cross, thereby telescoping into the future women's re lie f efforts be­ gun during the Civil War.^^

The post Civil War industrial and urban expansion worsened living conditions for increased numbers of people. Industrialization simul­ taneously relieved middle- and upper-class women of much of the necessity to make economic contributions to their families. Increased leisure time of these women, combined with the deteriorating living conditions of many other Americans, furnished women opportunities to exercise their social housekeeping skills in a variety of fields.

Settlement houses, notable examples of women's culture in action outside the home, dramatically expressed the contrast between women's culture and the dominant culture. This contrast is symbolized in the philanthropic motives of Jane Addams and Andrew Carnegie. Whereas

Carnegie sought to express his gospel of wealth by providing the tools with which the ambitious poor could rise in status, Addams aimed to build bridges of common understanding to the poor and to help the poor

in cross section improve their lo t. "The common attribute of /Addams and other settlement worker^/ was a b ility to reduce abstract issues to 48 human terms and to translate high ideals into prosaic practice."

Settlement workers strove to improve living conditions and to re­

lieve human suffering on a community-wide basis. Involvement with the

working class naturally led them to address issues concerning working

women. In particular, settlement workers and other women philanthro­

pists participated in the National Women's Trade Union League as a 23 means of meliorating adverse working conditions.49

Alternative women's organizations to settlement houses and labor unions also appealed to large numbers of women. The Young Women's

Christian Association which originated in the 1860s, the Women's Chris­ tian Temperance Union founded in 1874, the Association of Collegiate

Alumnae founded in 1882, and the General Federation of Women's Clubs founded in 1890, grew dramatically innumbers.By 1920, the GFWC numbered about one million women, the WCTU about 800,000 and the YWCA about 500,000.^^ These and like organizations educated women in leader­ ship, awareness of community and national issues, and means of achieving change through government action. Women most involved in extending women's influence through government reform were those in the

suffrage movement, particularly the National American Woman Suffrage

Association and even more the Congressional Union led by Alice Paul.

Other women's organizations, however, also worked through various levels

of government to accomplish their reforms.

Women's cultural principles of woman's autonomy and humane ideals

pervaded a ll of these organiztions. Even during the First World War,

two of the prominent women's organizations involved in war-related

issues expressed women's culture in their ac tiv itie s . The Women's

Peace Party broadened the concept of nurturant motherhood to include

the demand to be consulted in settlement of questions affecting indi­

viduals or nations. The Women's Section of the Navy League, while

contending that women as dependent keepers of homes and children re­

quired protection, also asserted that women's own protective functions 24 extended beyond the home to the nation. In the case of both organi­ zations, "so strongly entrenched was the ideology /o f nurturant motherhood/ that the women activists could not envision a female role distinct from nurturance--whether in the home or in the larger society.

After the First World War, the pattern of women's active exten­ sion of their culture outside domestic limits was well-established.

Taking over from NAWSA, the National League of Women Voters by 1922 extended its activities on the state level to work for

election laws, eugenics, labor legislation, mothers' pensions, children's codes, city manager government, equal rights, marriage laws, birth control, anti- lynching, fiscal reform, governmental reorganization and efficiency, school attendance, jury service, vice repression, and appointment of women to state boards and commissions.

Not only at the local and state levels but at the national level as well women continued to urge humanitarian principles on government decision makers. Julia Lathrop and later Grace Abbott, for example, as heads of the U. S. Children's Bureau, worked to eliminate or regu­ late child labor.

Not a ll women's organizations were as well-known as those men­ tioned above. Among the lesser known groups was the P. E. 0.

Sisterhood, an organization which typified nineteenth century women's culture and which later played a major role in the history of Cottey

College. 25

P. E. 0. is a sorority founded on the Iowa Wesleyan College cam­ pus by seven college women in 1869. The seven friends formalized their sisterhood when some but not all of their number were invited to join I. C. Sorosis which then was the only sorority on campus. De­ termined never to be divided, they took a secret vow, adopted a secret name abbreviated to P. E. 0. Sisterhood, and chose the star as their symbol. Each point of the star represented one of their values: fa ith ,

love, purity, justice, truth. Throughout the remainder of their stay at Iowa Wesleyan, P. E.O.'s distinguished themselves from the other

sorority whenever possible and thereby declared their solidarity. At

the 1869 graduation ceremonies they boldly bobbed their hair and wore

pastel colored tarlton dresses, a filmy fabric in striking contrast to

the traditional black satin worn by other members of their class.

Upon graduation the seven sisters took their organization with them

and P. E. 0. became a sorority of the community rather than of the

campus.

The Victorian roots of P. E. 0. grew in the female world of love

and ritual described by Smith-Rosenberg.^^ The sisterhood formalized

by creation of P. E. 0. institutionalized gender role differentiation

and solidified a homosocial network of women. As Smith-Rosenberg has

shown, such relationships were "recognized. . . as a socially viable 57 form of human contact." Their strong cohesive bonding remained a

distinctive characteristic of the P. E. 0. through the years and was a

keystone of the organization's expression of women's culture. 26

After P. E. 0. le ft campus, membership grew rapidly through select invitation of family members and friends. Fifty years after its found­ ing the Sisterhood numbered 20,798 active members.The rapid and sizeable growth of P. E. 0. and the continuing adherence to its found­ ing principles of sisterhood indicate how well the organization met women's needs. Women responded positively to P. E. O.'s secret name and vow which set the members apart from society and which at the same time institutionalized a strong, lasting bond of sisterhood. So firm is that bond that, at death, members pass into Chapter Eternal, always to be a P. E. 0. Sister. The s p irit of sisterhood born and nurtured in Victorian America with P. E. 0. continued to appeal to women and to satisfy their needs. By 1947, the active membership reached 92,221 and continued to grow.^^ That the Sisterhood maintained its princi­ ples and grew to significant numbers by the mid-twentieth century strongly suggests that the homosocial networking and women's culture which gave birth to P. E. 0. survived with and through the organiza­

tion.

The P. E. 0. Sisterhood served more than a social function for

its members. Shunning political activity in order to preserve its

women's culture, i t adopted, in the course of time, several projects

promoting women's education. The Educational Fund, established by the

national organization in 1907, provided low-interest educational loans

for women.In 1927 P. E. 0. accepted the donation of Cottey College,

a two-year liberal arts college for women, from one of its members who

founded the college.®^ After the Second World War a scholarship fund 27 for international women students and a continuing education fund for older women extended P. E. 0. educational ac tivities .

As the Sisterhood grew in numbers i t developed a hierarchical or­ ganizational structure. After 1883, when the only unit of organization was local chapters, several chapters united in the Grand Chapter of

Iowa. When chapters organized -In other states, the various Grand

Chapters united in 1892 under the Supreme Grand Chapter which was re­ named Supreme Chapter in 1909. National officers were denoted

Supreme Chapter officers and national conventions called Supreme Con­ ventions. Each level of organization, from local to state to Supreme

Chapter, carries with i t a fu ll retinue of officers. Generally P. E.

0. leaders move through the ranks step by step from local to Supreme level.

Like other nineteenth century women's organizations, P. E. 0. appealed to white, middle-class women. By so literally asserting their sisterhood, P. E. O.'s focussed the strength of woman-bonding so typi­ cal of women of their class. They found no contradiction in marriage and traditional domestic lif e with membership in P. E. 0. The secrecy of their name and vow reinforced women's autonomy and th eir support of women's education extended the principle of autonomy to the next gen­ eration. In 1927 when the Sisterhood assumed ownership of Cottey

College, P. E. 0. became part of the institution-building aspect of women's culture. 2 8

Educational institutions, settlement houses and labor unions were only some of the areas in which women created institutions according to their own design, but since this study is concerned with a college, a closer look at women's education is needed. 'lomen's drive for higher education in the nineteenth century produced a dramatic debate on woman's nature and the ways in which her nature was affected by higher education. This discussion was separate from but parallel to the domestic assumption for women's roles, the assumption that only roles within the home are appropriate for women. Edward H. Clarke, a professor in the medical school at Harvard College, created the sen­ sational controversy in 1873 when he asserted, in effect, that anatomy is destiny. Specifying that the body can operate only one of its systems (digestive, nervous, reproductive) at any one time without damage to the other systems, Clarke stated that woman's reproductive system could be irreparably damaged by the strenuous mental exertion of college education.What woman can do, he said, is determined by 65 her "organization". Other medical authorities agreed. I . S. Clous- ton applied a primitive medical theory of the conservation of energy

by suggesting that energy which is used for one bodily function is not

available forothers.Thus, mental effort would inhibit other bodily

functions; in the case of women, it would be detrimental to their

reproductive functions. He extended his theory beyond the lifetime of

the individual and asserted that i f one generation uses too much of

this energy i t w ill draw i t away from the next generation, thus weak­

ening the next generation.®^ 29

Fear for degenerative children of women who educated their minds related to the more general issue of racial survival. The "Negro- question" during post-Civil War reconstruction, and increasing aware­ ness of racial differences which came with escalating immigration from southern and eastern European countries in the late nineteenth century, intensified concern of many Americans for the spectre of "race sui­ cide" when i t was discovered that college-educated women were less apt to marry and when they did marry, to bear fewer children. Thus, to many in the dominant culture, the future of the race was at stake i f women dared to go for education.

Woman's nature was determined by her anatomy, so the argument went, and nature thus dictated the kind of education which was appro­ priate for her. According to Clarke, women certainly should not be

subjected to coeducation which subjects them to the same educational

format as men; since women are different from men this w ill result in

harm to the women.He proposed that Americans adopt the European

practice of halting g irls ' education at puberty, thus avoiding harm to

their reproductive organization.^^ Clouston agreed. Over-educating

women, he warned, can lead to anemia, stunted growth, nervousness, hys­

teria, "inflamation of the brain and its membranes, and insanity.

Perhaps the point was summarized best in Harper's Magazine which warned

that for education to be wasted on women in pursuit of scholarly at­

tainments was to waste "the world's most precious commodity--good

womanly women. 30

The narrowly defined nature of women and their consequently limited education challenged women's defenders. In 1874 Julia Ward

Howe published Sex and Education, a collection of essays by various authors in response to Clarke's book. Howe was indignant about

Clarke's contentions and complained b itte rly about the double stand­ ard which i t implied. "No woman could publish facts and speculations concerning the special physical economy of the other sex, on so free and careless a plane, without incurring the gravest rebuke for inso- 72 lence and immodesty." The essays in Howe's book generally avoided the issue of woman's nature and instead challenged Clarke with social and environmental factors affecting women and with women's experience and contributions in the larger society. The strongest argument as­ serted that uneducated women also suffer from the disorders which 73 Clarke contended resulted from education.

Presidents of women's colleges likewise defended their in stitu ­ tions against Clarke's charges. At the twenty-fifth anniversary celebration for Smith College (1900), President L. Clarke Seelye re­ ported, "statistics show that the health record in colleges for women

. . . is superior to that of women generally."^^ Ten years later at the Bryn Mawr College twenty-fifth celebration the same issue s t ill

haunted him, and he asserted that most college women grow stronger in­

tellectually and physically. President J. M. Taylor of Vassar also contended that even before Bryn Mawr was founded i t had been proved 75 that education was not detrimental to women's health. Possibly

Taylor referred not only to the record of Vassar since 1865 but also 31 to the study published by the Association of Collegiate Alumnae in

1885 which disproved that college education was harmful to women's health, a study commended by John Dewey.

Women in the medical profession also defended women's education.

Dr. Lucy M. Hall, in 1887, responded to an address which echoed Clarke by Dr. Withers Moore to the British Medical Association. She heatedly asked.

Where is there a physician who does not know of count­ less numbers of women among the wealthier classes who are beset by all manner of ailments, for no other reason than because they have nothing to do, or rather because they have brought nothing into their lives which called forth the strong motive forces of their natures?

Another physician. Dr. Mary T. Bissell, wrote in 1888 that "women who are receiving the so-called higher education, find in its disci­

pline and opportunity the best remedy for any tendency to excessive 78 emotional disturbance." Thus education not only was not harmful to women, i t had a positive effect on their emotional natures.

The possible i l l effects of higher education on women which Clarke

raised, nonetheless caused some parents second thoughts about the

advisability of sending their daughters to college. In Jane Addams'

family, both of her older sisters had attended Rockford Seminary, "and

they had not been unfitted for marriage and motherhood by the exper­

ience. . . /which/ may have been part of the reason John Addams

preferred Rockford to Smith /College/ for his youngest child," Jane.^^

Although she suffered a sudden illness upon graduating from Rockford 32 and returning home, Addams had maintained good health while a stu­ dent.

Women's higher educational institutions in the late nineteenth century were born amidst the liv e ly debate about women's nature. Was it medically safe for women to use their intellects for advanced study, or would women students, their future offspring, and the vi­ tality of the race suffer irreparable damage from their mental exertions? I f i t was medically safe to educate women, what kind of education should they be permitted? Should women be educated only in home-related subjects, or should they be extended an equal education to that offered in institutions for men?

Although Clarke's hysterical fears about the educational threat to women's health created a sensational national debate, women's high­ er education continued to progress. At the time Clarke spread his alarm, many institutions admitted women students. These included such old women's institutions as Milwaukee College (founded 1848), Downer

College (1855), Wells College (founded 1868 and achieved collegiate status 1870) and Mount Holyoke College (founded 1837, achieved col­ legiate status 1888) as well as coeducational colleges such as Oberlin and Antioch and coeducational state universities in California, Indi­ ana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri and Wisconsin.

Although they refused to succumb to Clarke's attacks, many women's colleges nonetheless fe ll on the defensive under his blows. In re­ sponse, they consciously strove to implement admission requirements 33 and curricula equal to the best men's colleges. At the same time they incorporated physical education into th eir programs as added insurance to protect their students' health. Many women's colleges, like

Vassar, Smith, and Wellesley combined the cult of true womanhood with intellectual discipline and high aca­ demic standards...... /They/ sought to produce educated women, who combined intellectual achievement with feminine virtue.

College education for women thus im plicitly posed a question to the dominant culture's contension "that women needed no more education than would fit them to fu lfill satisfactorily the duties of a house- 83 wife and mother." Since the early days of the Republic the education permitted to women was only that which would enable them to "shape the characters of their sons and husbands in the direction of benevo- 84 lence, self-res train t, and responsible independence." College education, however, implied training for women beyond that necessary for enlightened motherhood's preparation of future citizens. Many women's colleges founded in the late nineteenth century strove to give their students an education equal to that available at men's colleges by adopting the same curricula and entrance standards. "How­ ever, while the women's schools talked of a curriculum similar to that at men's schools, there was always a special focus on subjects

OC believed to be of interest to women." Coeducational institutions also offered similar curricular opportunities to women and men al­

though women frequently were limited in the degree programs they could

enter.Eastern opposition to coeducation resulted in a third in­

stitutional alternative for women, the coordinate college which 34 paralleled an existent men's college in faculty and often facilities 87 but which segregated women students. Curricula available at co­ ordinate colleges were similar to those at women's colleges and coeducational institutions.

I t was women students, not the institutions themselves, who bore the brunt of nineteenth century curricular change from educating women for enlightened motherhood to educating women equally with men for participation in all levels of the larger society. It was the late twentieth century before educational opportunities for women neared the goal of preparing women for fu ll integration into society, and even then many social barriers prevented integration of educated wo­ men. But college women and alumnae in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries internalized the social conflict which women's education excited. The case of Vassar College illustrates the pain these women fe lt.

Mary Norris '70 noted that her classmates fe lt the desire "to accomplish something for humanity which would prove how good a thing i t was to give a college education to women." But was that something to lie in superior performance of woman's traditional ob­ ligations or in something else altogether? This uncertainty le f t the graduate not simply unsure of her course of action but also with the feeling that she was damned whatever her choice. As one graduate noted: those who turned their back on the kitchen would be told, "See how education unfits women for domestic life !" while those who confined themselves to their traditional role were plagued by the accu­ satory whisper, "Is this all she can do with her education? What a waste."

The nineteenth century debate over women's education was fueled by vast economic alterations which began shifting traditional roles 35

and relationships, by aggressive men's values in the dominant culture which reached for encompassing control of the environment, and by an

assertive women's culture which strove for personal autonomy and

humanistic melioration of the environment. In this context, Cottey

College was founded in a small, remote Missouri town by a woman who

herself had been denied a college education in her youth. The follow­

ing chapters relate Cottey College to the larger women's culture and

trace its development to 1965 when women's culture at the college

effectively was subsumed by the dominant culture. NOTES FOR CHAPTER I I

1. Kathryn Kish Sklar, Catharine Beecher: A Study in American Domes­ tic ity , (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, Incorporated, 197377 p. 210.

2. Nancy F. Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: "Woman's Sphere" in New England, 1780-1835, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 197777 p. 98.

3. Cott, Bonds, p. 100.

4. Gerda Lerner, "New Approaches to the Study of Women in American History," reprinted in The Majority Finds Its Past: Placing Women in History, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 5.

5. Mary R itter Beard, Woman as Force in History, (New York: Collier Books, 1946).

6. Lerner, The Majority Finds Its Past, p.xx iii.

7. Lerner, "New Approaches," p. 11.

8. Lerner, "New Approaches," p. 12.

9. Reprinted in The Majority Finds Its Past, pp. 15-30.

10. "Placing Women in History: Definitions and Challenges," reprinted in The Majority Finds Its Past, pp. 158-159.

11. "The Challenge of Women's History," reprinted in The Majority Finds Its Past, p. 178.

12. "The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820-1860," American Quarterly, 18 (1966), pp. 151-174.

13. Cott, Bonds, p. 92.

14. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, "The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations between Women in Nineteenth Century America," Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 1:1, (Autumn 1975), p. 9.

36 37 15. Ruth H. Bloch, "Untangling the Roots of Modern Sex Roles: A Survey of Four Centuries of Change," Signs, 4:2 (Winter, 1978), p. 247.

16. Nancy F. Cott, "Passionlessness: An Interpretation of Victorian Sexual Ideology, 1790-1850," Signs, 4:2 (Winter, 1978), p. 233.

17. Cott, "Passionlessness," p. 233.

18. Linda Gordon, Woman's Body, Woman's Right: A Social History of Birth Control in America, (New York: Penguine Books, 1974), p. 95.

19. Gordon, Woman's Body, pp. 97, 101.

20. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, "The Hysterical Woman: Sex Roles and Role Conflict in 19th Century America," Social Research: An International Quarterly of the Social Sciences, 39:4 (Winter, 1972T7 pp. 652-678; see also Sheila M. Rothman, Woman's Proper Place: A History of Chang­ ing Ideals and Practices, 1870 to the Present, (New York: Basic Books, Inc., Publishers, 1978), p. 26.

21. Cott, "Passionlessness," p. 233.

22. Smith-Rosenberg, "The Female World," p. 20.

23. Smith-Rosenberg, "The Female World," pp. 14, 16, passim.

24. Smith-Rosenberg, "The Female World," p. 16, passim.

25. Quoted by Nancy Sahli in "Smashing: Women's Relationships before the F all," Chrysalis, 8 (Summer 1979), p. 21.

26. Sahli, "Smashing," p. 19.

27. Sahli, "Smashing," p. 18.

28. Sahli, "Smashing," pp. 18, 25.

29. Smith-Rosenberg, "The Female World"; Blanche Wiesen Cook, "Female Support Networks and Political Activism: L illia n Wald, Crystal Eastman, Emma Goldman," Chrysali s 3 (1977), pp. 43-61; Ellen Condi iffe Lage- mann, A Generation of Women : Education in the Lives of Progressive Reformers, (Cambrfdge: Harvard University Press, 197^7, see especially pp. 150-154; Estelle Freedman, "Separatism as Strategy: Female In s ti­ tution Building and American Feminism, 1870-1930," Feminist Studies, 5:3 (Fall 1979), pp. 512-529, see especially 514-517; Carl N. Degler, At Odds: Women and the Family in America from the Revolution to the Present,(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), Chapter V II, pp. 144- 177; L illia n Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friend­ ship and Love between Women from the Renaissance to the Present, (New York: William Morrow and Company, In c ., 1981), see especially pp. 145- 230. 38

30. Cook, "Female Support," p. 45.

31. Lagerman, A Generation, p. 152.

32. Lagermann, A Generation, pp. 153-155; Freedman, "Separatism," pp. 513-514.

33. "Women, Saints, and Sanctuaries," Signs, 3:1 (Autumn 1977), pp. 105, 111.

34. Mernissi, "Women, Saints," pp. 103, 112.

35. Bloch, "Untangling," p. 249.

36. Barbara Welter, "The Feminization of American Religion: 1800- 1860," in Insights and Parallels: Problems and Issues of American Social History, Ed. William L. O 'N eill, (Minneapolis: Burgess Pub­ lishing Company, 1973), p. 312.

37. Welter, "The Feminization," p. 309.

38. Cott, Bonds, p. 138.

39. Margery Fox, "Protest in Piety: Christian Science Revisited," International Journal of Women's Studies, 1:4 (July/August 1978), p. 414.

40. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Religion and the Rise of the American C ity: The New York City Mission Movement, 1812-1870, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1971), p. 97.

41. Smith-Rosenberg, Religion, pp. 118-120.

42. Mary Ryan, Womanhood in America from Colonial Times to the Present, (New York: New Viewpoints, 1975), p. 128.

43. Gerda Lerner, The Grimke Sisters from South Carolina, (New York: Schocken Books, 1967).

44. Ryan, Womanhood, p. 227.

45. Rothman, Woman's Proper, p. 63.

46. Robert H. 3remner, American Philanthropy, (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1960), p. 92; Merle Curti, "Clara Barton," pp. 103- 108, Notable American Women, 1607-1950, Vol. I , Eds. Edward T. James, Janet Wilson James and Paul S. Boyer, (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971).

47. Ryan, Womanhood, pp. 193, passim. 39

48. Bremner, American Philanthropy, pp. 114-115.

49. Eleanor Flexner, Century of Struggle, (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1975), Second Edition, pp. 218-219.

50. Flexner, Century, pp. 183-186.

51. Ryan, Womanhood, p. 231.

52. Barbara J. Steinson, '"The Mother Half of Humanity': American Women in the Peace and Prepardness Movements in World War I I," in Carol R. Berkin and Clara M. Lovett, Eds., Women, War and Revolution, (New York: Holmes and Meier Publishers, Inc., 1980T7"p. 276.

53. Stanley Lemons, The Woman Citizen: Social Feminism in the 1920s, (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972), p. 119.

54. Grace Abbott, The Child and The State, 2 vols., (Chicago: Univer­ sity of Chicago Press, 1938); J ill Kerr Conway, "Grace Abbott," Notable American Women, Vol. I , pp. 2-4; Louise C. Wade, "Julia Clifford Lathrop," Notable American Women, Vol. I I , pp. 370-372.

55. Stella Clapp, Out of the Heart: A Century of P.IE . 0 ., 1869-1969, (Des Moines: The P. E. 0. Sisterhood, 1968).

56. Smith-Rosenberg, "The Female World."

57. Smith-Rosenberg, "The Female World," p. 24.

58. "Membership Summary by Biennium," P^. £. 0^. Record, 59:11 (Novem­ ber 1947), p. 28.

59. "Membership Summary."

60. "The P. E. 0. Educational Fund," 2» 1- 0- Record, 58:9 (September, 1946), p. 10.

61. P.. £. 0. Record, 38:11 (November 1927), pp. 1, 9.

62. Winona Evans Reeves, "The International Chapter," P.£. 0. Record, 51:12 (December 1939), p. 17.

63. In 1979 Supreme Chapter was renamed International Chapter to in­ corporate the long-standing membership of Canadian P. O.'s E. into the name.

64. Edward H. Clarke, M. D ., Sex in Education, or A Fair Chance for G irls, (Boston: James R. Osgood and Company, 1874), Chapter 2 and p. 117.

65. Clarke, Sex, p. 12. 40

66. T. S. Clouston, M. D., "Female Education from a Medical Point of View," The Popular Science Monthly, 24 (December 1883), p. 216.

67. Clouston, "Female Education," p. 218.

68. Clarke, Sex, Chapter 4.

69. Clarke, Sex, Chapter 5.

70. T. S. Clouston, M. 0 ., "Female Education from a Medical Point of View," The Popular Science Monthly, 24 (January 1884), pp. 327-330.

71. "The Education of Women," Harper's New Monthly Magazine, 67: 398 (July 1883), p. 295.

72. Julia Ward Howe, ed.. Sex and Education: A Reply to Dr. E. Clarke's "Sex in Education," (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 18847, P- 7.

73. Howe, Sex, p. 21.

74. Celebration of the Quarter-Century of Smith College, (Cambridge: The Riverside Press, 1900), p. 129.

75. Bryn Mawr College: Twenty-Fifth Anniversary, (N.p.: privately printed, 1910), pp. 17, 9-10.

76. John Dewey, "Education and the Health of Women," Science Supple­ ment, 6:141 (October 16, 1885), pp. 341-342, and "Health and Sex in Higher Education," The Popular Science Monthly, 23 (March 1886), pp. 606-614.

77. Lucy M. H all, M. D., "Higher Education of Women and the Family," The Popular Science Monthly, 30 (March 1887), p. 616.

78. Mary T. B issell, M. 0 ., "Emotions Versus Health in Women," The Popular Science Monthly, 32 (February 1888), p. 510.

79. Allen F. Davis, American Heroine: The Life and Legend of Jane Addams, (London: Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 12.

80. Davis, American Heroine, p. 24.

81. Grace Norton Kieckhafer, The History of Milwaukee-Downer College, 1861-1951 (Milwaukee: Milwaukee-Downer College, 1950), pp. 2, 43; Walter Iranaeus Lowe, Wells College and Its Founders: An Historical Sketch (N.p.: Wells College, 1901), p. 12; Saul Sack, "The Higher Edu­ cation of Women, 1862-1962," in A Century of Higher Education, Eds. William W. Drickman and Stanley Lehrer, (New York: Society for the Advancement of Education), p. 171; Barbara J. Harris, Beyond Her Sphere: Women and the Professions in American History, (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 197877 p. 99. 41

82. Harris, Beyond, pp. 100, 118.

83. L. Clark Seelye, The Early History of Smith College, 1871-1910, (Boston: Houghton M ifflin Company, 192377 p. 59.

84. Linda K. Kerber, "Daughters of Columbia: Educating Women for the Republic, 1787-1805," p. 89, in Our American Sisters: Women in American Life and Thought, Eds. Jean E. Friedman and William G. Shade, 2nd Edition, (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, In c., 1976). See also: Cott, Bonds, pp. 92-97.

85. Adele Simmons, "Education and Ideology in Nineteenth-Century America: The Response of Educational Institutions to the Changing Role of Women," p. 117, in Liberating Women's History: Theoretical and C ritical Essays, Ed. Berenice A. Carroll, (Urbana: University of Illin o is Press, 1976).

86. Simmons, "Education and Ideology," p. 120; Charlotte Williams Conable, Women at Cornell: The Myth of Equal Education, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), pp. 112-115.

87. Simmons, "Education and Ideology," p. 122.

88. Debra Herman, "Victims of Equal Education: On the Failure of the Vassar Experiment in Women's Education," unpublished paper read at the Fifth Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Vassar College, June 1981. CHAPTER I I I

WOMEN'S CULTURE AND WOMEN'S INSTITUTION BUILDING

AT COTTEY COLLEGE

Virginia Alice Cottey fu lfille d her fondest dream when she opened her own school for girls in 1884. Originally she called her school

Vernon Seminary because i t was situated in Vernon County, Missouri; but within two years she adopted the name generally used by the local citizens, Cottey College. The college symbolized and expressed her personal values as well as the values of nineteenth century women's culture. Alice Cottey's life exemplified woman's autonomy and nurtur- ance of human lif e . She institutionalized these values at her college and in the process institutionalized the nineteenth century concept of sisterhood as well. It is not surprising, then, that she ultimately donated Cottey College to the P. E. 0. Sisterhood in 1927 with firm confidence that her college would be perpetuated according to princi­ ples of which she approved.

This chapter begins with a biographical sketch of Virginia Alice

Cottey and places her founding of Cottey College within the context of western expansion and women's educational tradition in Missouri. I t

then describes the women's world and women's culture which the founder

institutionalized at the college—a culture which included training

for women's destiny as moral leaders of society and an intimate

42 43 atmosphere of sisterhood in which faculty served as role models to nurture the founder's concept of exalted womanhood and in which students formed strong and lasting bonds with each other and with their teachers. Pervading a ll was an academic program devoted to the liberal arts. The chapter concludes with the donation of Cottey to the P. E.

0. Sisterhood in 1927.

Virginia Alice Cottey was born on her parents' prairie homestead near Edina in northeastern Missouri. Her mother, Sarah Elizabeth Eads

Cottey, bore twelve children in the twenty-two years from 1840 to

1862. The fir s t two children, both g irls , died in infancy. She bore two sons before Virginia Alice was born, March 27, 1848. Thus Alice came to be the eldest daughter in the family which included five more girls and another boy. Anoth’er child was stillborn.^

Sarah and her husband, Ira Day Cottey, migrated from Kentucky to

their remote Missouri farm in 1840 following in the footsteps of her 2 parents who had made the trek a year ea rlier. Sarah's father, Martin

Luther Eads, was born in Virginia where la te r, as a struggling farmer,

he redirected his lif e with conversion to Christianity during the

Second Great Awakening. He made his decision in 1816 at a camp meet­

ing in Fluvanna County. Thereafter he studied to qualify as a Method­

is t deacon and elder. In 1829 he moved his family to Kentucky where

he received his fir s t fulltim e appointment to the ministry and was

O ordained in 1831. Sarah's husband followed her father's profession

when, in 1844, he was appointed by the Southern Methodist Church to

hold religious meetings in their new home.^ Along with religious 44 principles, education was greatly valued in Sarah's family. She and her husband determined to educate a ll of their children, and with their strong support, four of the six daughters became school teachers and the three sons became, respectively, a farmer, an attorney and state 5 senator, and a banker.

From her parents Alice learned "courage and self denial, love of

God, of family and of duty." "Strong religious conviction," she said,

"is inseparable from my heritage.She also remembered that, "next to reverence for almighty God came. . . ambition tolearn.Not only her mother but also her father encouraged her education, and Alice re­ membered as a child--

Sitting on my father's knee by the fireside one evening he said, "Daughter, when you are grown up, I want you to be a teacher." The warmth of affection he displayed and unusual earnestness of his voice caused the words to take deep root in my heart, and probably had much to do with my later development of the idea.

In spite of meager educational resources in their community,

Alice's family enjoyed the benefits of a library owned by a neighbor,

William Dod. Dod had graduated as valedictorian of his class at

Princeton University, and had taught mathematics for many years at

Center College in Danville, Kentucky before moving to Missouri. He generously shared the books which he accumulated in the course of his academic career with the Cottey children. Alice, a voracious reader,

in this way gained much of her education. "Sarah would le t Alice alone and excuse her from the housework whenever she saw her curled up

in a chair reading by the new heatingstove.When the Sisters of 45

Loretto opened St. Joseph's Academy for girls at nearby Edina, Alice was one of the fir s t to enroll. At age 18, she entered this academy and within one year completed the tenth grade curriculum--the maximum education availablethere.Two years later she attended a private high school operated by George R. Balthrope, in Newark, Missouri, where she completed the available courses in six months.

Now feeling qualified for greater horizons, Alice was disappoint­ ed and humiliated when she was unable to find a salaried teaching position. Failing all else, she opened a family school at home for her younger sisters and brother. When a neighbor offered tuition for his own son to attend her classes, she enjoyed her fir s t salary. Almost

70 years later she proudly recalled, "From that time to the day of my resignation as president of Cottey College I was never numbered among 12 the unemployed." Knowing his sister's desire for a regular teaching post, Louis Cottey, through his contacts as an attorney, helped Alice 13 gain a position at Richmond College in western Missouri in 1871.

Alice taught one year in the preparatory department. A promotion to the college department the following year failed to hold her interest, however. She missed her family and although her contract was renewed for a third year, she returned home to assist further in preparing her younger sisters and brother for college.^^ At age 25, then, Alice once again lived with her family and taught in the local d is tric t school,

thus completing a pattern common in the Victorian era when eldest

daughters remained at or returned to their parents' home to help rear younger siblings. 46

A v is it by The Reverend Mr. Marshall Mcllhaney to the Cottey home in the centennial year, 1876, started Alice Cottey on the road to her own independent college. Mcllhaney, the new president of Central Fe­ male College at Lexington, Missouri, was impressed by her self-taught

French capability and her a b ility in mathematics. He invited her to teach those subjects at his college. Cottey gladly accepted and with her younger sister, Dora, who enrolled as a student, began an eight- 15 year teaching career at the college. These years provided her the opportunity for a college education which was otherwise inaccessible to her. "During that time," she said, she "studied and taught almost everything offered at that time in a standard college course. . .

Cottey's voracious reading not only developed her mind, but open­ ed new doors for her. She recalled that

Among the good books that fe ll into my hands was the lif e of Mary Lyon--founder of Mt. Holyoke College--one of the fir s t schools for the higher education of women founded in the United States. I was thrilled with the story and longed to at- y, tempt something similar in this western country.

Thereafter, Cottey acknowledged only three influences on her com- 18 mitment to women's education: her family, God, and Mary Lyon. She

determined to f u lf ill her dream and to establish her own school imme­

diately. "It was this conviction in my heart," she said,

that the world needed schools in which i t would be possible to provide scholastic training in an en­ vironment dominated by the ideals of home and reverence of almight God that became a dominant and compelling force over my lif e . 47

At age 35, when she set out to establish her own school, Cottey's character was well-defined and visibly expressed by her physical ap­ pearance. Of diminuative stature she nonetheless carried her frame

straight as a teacher's rule. The up-right back and squared-off

shoulders gave an impression of authority and self-assurance emphasized

by the high-necked, w rist- and ankle-length fashion of the day. Her

dark hair was center-parted and folded in firm waves to the mound

gathered efficie n tly and neatly at the crown of her head. The hair

drawn away from her face accentuated a wide, steady gaze through her

pince-nez secured by a black cord neatly draped over her right ear and

looped around her neck. A firm though benevolent set to her jaw, which

in later years almost betrayed a Mona Lisa smile, possibly hinted at

pride in her accomplishments for God and for women. A glance at her

countenance reassures one that friends who tried failed to discourage

her from this venture. I t was this Virginia Alice Cottey who commit­

ted her lif e to the infant college she bore--

Giving i t all one has of dreams, ambition, purpose, courage, hope, and faith and determination. Never admitting defeat, never turning back or letting down. Never sacrificing principle for expediency. Holding steadfast to the ideal and successfully lead- ' ing the w ill of others to the same service.

Only in 1890, six years after Cottey College began operation, did

Alice Cottey marry. She was nearly forty-two years old, what was gen­

erally considered an advanced age for brides in the Victorian era.

Most of her sisters and brothers, however, also married relatively

late. Her brothers were aged 24, 32 and 40 years; her sisters were

aged 20, 28, 38 and 52 years when they married. One sister died single 48 21 at age 63. Cottey married Samuel M. Stockard in the parlor of her college building with family, students and faculty in attendance. Sam

Stockard was a widower from Springfield, Missouri, who met Cottey when he enrolled his three small children in the lower division of her school.

He had no great ambition for himself. He was genial, fat, and his hair was red--what there was of it. His brown eyes twinkled with jokes and good humor. He was a good companion, a Methodist, and a traveling salesman who wanted a home and his children around him. He was not as deeply religious as she was and did not mind a drink now and then, but Alice over­ looked his faults and thought of him only as someone she liked to be with. She was comfortable with him. He listened patiently to her stories of difficulties and triumphs in the school and sympathized with her disappointments.

Thus, Alice Cottey chose a husband for companionship. He was a man who travelled frequently and who accepted her profession at the college as an integral part of their married life. Upon returning from their honeymoon to Fayetteville and L ittle Rock, Arkansas, Sam Stockard joined his children and wife in their living quarters in the college building. He soon became a travelling secretary for the college and helped in recruiting students. Six-and-a-half years after their wed­ ding, Sam Stockard died at Kerbyville, Missouri, "where he had been 23 engaged in business for some months." Apparently his business establishment away from his wife in Nevada reflects no r i f t in the mar-

i t riage. Alice Cottey Stockard was shaken by her husband's death. Her * Virginia Alice Cottey Stockard is referred to hereafter as Stockard even though some references are made to a period prior to her marriage. The college is referred to as Cottey College, or simply, Cottey. 49 feelings intensified with memory of a dream she had the night before receiving news of his death in which she envisioned

her husband taking her in his arms and kissing her saying, "Goodbye, my darling." She was sure that p. this was his farewell to her and that he was dead.

Her husband's death only temporarily interrupted administration of the college, however. Stockard was devoted to her step-children and kept them with her until they completed the fu ll course of study at Cottey

College.

Stockard faced many personal losses during her long administration at Cottey. One sister died in 1892 and another in 1901. In 1904 the vocal teacher, Madame Edouard B litz , despondent over i l l health, took her own lif e . In 1915, Stockard's eldest brother died, followed with­ in 21 months by a sister, her mother, her step-daughter, and a niece who taught at Cottey. In 1920 another brother died. Stockard sur­ vived these crises with reliance on her religious convictions and the demands of her college to give her lif e purpose and direction. She was a strong woman.

Stockard, though a woman of the Victorian era, never allowed the domestic assumption for women to narrow her vision. She was one of many optimistic entrepreneurs in the developing state of Missouri who

seized any available opportunity. Stockard vividly expressed the ex­

citement she fe lt at the momentum of change occurring around her.

During these years between 1850 and 1880 the country had passed through the throes of the Civil War and its aftermath of panic and depression. The Texas Republic had become a member of the United States. California and other states were organized and 50

admitted to the union. The colorful drama of steam- boating on the Mississippi had reached its climax and faced a final curtain as the marvelous developments of the new steel industry unleashed the "iron horses" to run rampant over the continent, breaking down the barriers that had held back a multiplying native stock, now being pushed forward and augmented by the millions of immigrants swarming upon these shores; until lo! almost as one might stand and see i t pass, the wilderness was no more. Science and invention set their battalions at the head of a ll the marching hosts and the country swung into a period of indus­ tria l advancement which for rapidity and scope of progress was without parallel in the history of the world.

"In the midst of this wide flung fie ld of action, moving with con­

stantly accelerated tempo," she said, "I found myself with youth, considerable experience in a congenial work, and a clearly determined 2fi conviction. ..." The energetic drive for control of the environ­ ment which typified the dominant culture was infectious, and Stockard

eagerly joined the contest. As her parents before her had conquered

the frontier wilderness, so Stockard now determined to place her mark

on the new west. Although she considered herself a part of the cul­

tural forces which surrounded her, gender restrictions prevented her

from participating in steamboat, railroad or industrial empire-build­

ing. Rather, Stockard's contribution was to the world of women's

culture and values which, irregardless of her motivations, contradicted

the dominant cultural values.

Stockard's response to industrialization differed sharply from

that of women in the East who experienced at f ir s t hand the wage labor 27 of factory work or the enforced idleness of nouveau riche ladies.

To a greater extent that the East, the West afforded entrepreneurial 51 opportunities--even to women. Rather than bearing the pinch of social strictures, Stockard took advantage of opportunities at hand to create her own college for women. In this she followed in the footsteps of

Catharine Beecher who in 1832 moved from Connecticut to Cincinnati,

Ohio, where she worked to materialize her vision of creating educa­ tional institutons designed to prepare "a corps of women teachers to po c iv iliz e the barbarous immigrants and lower classes of the West."

Likewise, as an entrepreneur, Stockard searched for a suitable site for her college, keeping in mind the local economic situation wherever she looked. Although she considered Fort Worth, Texas and Rolla,

Appleton City and Nevada, Missouri, the citizens of Nevada responded 20 most favorably to her proposal. She astutely took advantage of boosterism expressed by Nevadans to negotiate the best deal possible.

Nevada, located near the Missouri-Kansas border, 100 miles south of Kansas City, was organized in 1855 and suffered badly in border warfare during the Civil War.^^ After the war, economic recovery began with a rapid influx of population into the county. In the 1860's the population of Vernon County increased 132 percent, from 4,850 to

11,247. Most the the growth occurred in the last half of the decade.

The growth rate moderated to a 70 percent increase in the 1870's and

a 63 percent increase in the 1880's. Thereafter for several decades,

the county maintained a population of about 31,500. The town of

Nevada, which was the county seat, was not listed by the U. S. census

prior to 1880. In 1880, Nevada's population was counted at 1,913 and 31 in the following decade increased 280 percent to 7,262. 52

The Missouri, Kansas and Texas Railroad opened a line through Nevada 32 in 1870, an event which encouraged growth of the area. Like other developing towns in the late nineteenth century which typically offer­ ed money or privileges to attract new businesses to their communities, the ambitious Nevada community attempted in 1870 to win construction of a state normal school in the town. Nevada voted $15,000 and

Vernon County voted $50,000 in support of this bid, but the school 33 fin a lly was located in Warrensburg, 100 miles away. The Panic of

1873, brought on by railroad speculation and overexpansion in other major sectors of the economy, slowed economic development in southwest

Missouri but the 1880's opened another period of growth. Nevada con- 34 tracted a gas company in 1882 and completed the water works in 1885.

The town also acquired an institution of lasting importance in 1885 when the state legislature created State Hospital No. 3 with an appro­ priation of $200,000 for its construction. To lure the hospital, 35 Nevada donated the necessary land.

To serve the educational needs of the growing population, various individual teachers opened schools in Nevada. The fir s t , a private school taught at the courthouse by Frank P. Anderson, opened in the summer of 1859. The fir s t public school opened in the winter of 1860-

1861 and was taught by Ava E. Page. The Nevada High School, organiz­ ed in the late 1870s, graduated its fir s t class of 10 members in 1880.

The high school's course of study was unorganized, however, until 1886 when the school board adopted a plan of study. 53

Within a year after Stockard announced her intentions to locate her school in Nevada, the town's voters approved $15,000 to erect two public school buildings: Franklin school and Jefferson school. The following year, in 1885, a school for blacks was organized in rented quarters, and in 1890 a black school was b u ilt for $530.30 combined cost for building and lot. In this one-room structure, Anna Hamby 38 taught 23 students. Although the black population was small, an ac­ count of their status written in an early history vividly portrays their situation in Nevada.

Only the more reputable and orderly are tolerated. The vicious, the idle and the worthless are gener­ a lly boycotted and induced to go elsewhere,--without, however, being maltreated or abused.ogNo instance of the murder of a negro is remembered.

Apparently only steps short of murder induced blacks to leave the community, and Confederate sympathies continued to pervade the com­ munity for decades after the Civil War.

Teacher training was a very real problem for the rural Missouri county in which Nevada was located. An 1870 law required the state superintendent to establish methods of examination and the minimum grades required for teacher certification.^^ In response, teachers' institutes, intended to improve teacher qualifications, opened in 52

Missouri counties in 1873.^^ Such programs were not held in Vernon

County, however, until 1883 when the fir s t in stitute was organized by

W. H. Martin, the county commissioner of schools. These institutes 4? were held annually throughout the state until 1903. Enrollment by the county's teachers was entirely voluntary and ranged from 41 to 54

216 with an average attendance of1 3 5 . Additional means of teacher training were sorely needed in Nevada.

I t was in the midst of the booming 1880s that Stockard entered with her ambitious proposal into this community where the interest in new schools and teacher education already was high. Pooling $3000 of her own savings and lesser amounts from her sisters, she prepared to launch her project. She and her sister Dora sought a suitable college site over a period of several months. They wrote to Southern

Methodist ministers across Missouri and also checked the possibilities in Texas. Fort Worth offered them eight acres of land and a $10,000 building. This was the best offer although interest also had been ex­ pressed by Appleton City and Rolla, Missouri.^

In early November, 1883, Stockard received a le tte r from The

Reverend W. T. McClure of Nevada. He reported that Nevada businessmen intended to discuss her proposal at a meeting November 19, and invited her to attend. On Saturday, November 17, 1883, the two sisters stepped from the train in Nevada to meet McClure and Nevada Mayor Harry C.

Moore, a department store proprietor, who escorted them about the town 45 inspecting possible sites for their college.

Stockard realized the local possibilities for her institution. In her proposal to the businessmen she asked that Nevada donate the land for her college in a genuine warranty deed; in return she would build a three-story building for 80 students and would enlarge i t as neces­ sary. The businessmen who assembled the following Monday not only 55 liked her speech, "but were impressed with her straight-forwardness, concise presentation, and her evident business ability."^® The sisters returned to Lexington leaving the businessmen to consider their pro­ posal more closely.

Stockard had carefully informed the Nevadans of her Fort Worth offer. The Nevada civic leaders understood the competitive situation and quickly prepared a bid for the college and formed a committee to raise the money necessary to purchase the desired land. By the fir s t week of December they offered her the land on the conditions she had specified. She accepted the offer immediately and told them that architects' drawings and specifications would be sent by the week pre­ ceding Christmas and that she would be in Nevada sometime during 47 Christmas week to le t the construction bids.

Thus Cottey College joined the ranks of sister institutions else­ where in Missouri, many of which antedated Cottey by several decades.

In early Missouri women commonly participated in education as teachers and students. George Caleb Bingham's widowed mother moved her family to Saline County in 1824 and opened a school to help support her fam- 48 ily. In other early schools widows or itinerant ministers often

taught both boys and girls.Three academies for women opened prior

to the Civil War: Lindenwood Female College at St. Charles (1827),

Baptist Female Academy (la te r Stephens College) at Columbia (1833) and

Christian Female College (la te r Columbia College) also at Columbia

(1851). After the war the Female Orphan School of the Christian

Church of Missouri (la te r known as William Woods College) opened at 56

Fulton in 1870, and St. Louis Academy for Girls (la te r Maryville

College) in 1872. All of these institutions were independent, all were located in the central or eastern part of the state, and a ll have survived to the present time.

Baptist Female Academy, "the fir s t institution of higher educa­ tion in Columbia," originated as a combined elementary and high school.

In 1851, when the competing Christian College opened, the Baptist Fe­ male Academy charter was revised to authorize conferring "the usual degrees awarded in colleges and seminaries." The early curriculum pro­

vided a basic education but excluded Latin or Greek "which were

regarded as almost a sacred monopoly of the male sex." By 1843, how­

ever, the curriculum included French and Latin and the students

"acquitted themselves in a manner rarely equalled by boys of the same amount of study. The students also "displayed an admirable mastery of

mathematics, 'usually a field of difficulties to the female mind.'"

Although the emerging women's movement in the nation apparently did

not influence the founding of this academy, the faculty and students

early asserted female intellectual capacity. When the First Regiment

of Missouri Volunteers prepared for the Florida Seminole War in 1837,

Lucy Ann Wales, fir s t preceptress of the academy, presented a hand-made

flag to Colonel Richard Gentry, regiment commander, and made "the fir s t

public address delivered by a woman in Columbia." A few years la te r,

in 1844, end-of-term student essays at the academy further projected

women's capabilities. Essay topics included "Chemistry, A Proper

Study For A Lady," "The Value of Mathematical Studies to a Lady," and 57 ,,50 "Ought Ladies to Engage in Politics.

Unlike eastern states where controversy over women's education often was heated, in Missouri, frontier dependence on women to fu l­ f i l l responsibilities, which in more settled communities were carried by men, contributed to the general acceptance of education for women.

A publication issued by Lindenwood College in 1850 stated--

Woman is the most important sex, and i f but half of the race can be educated, le t i t be woman instead of man. Woman forms our character—she is with us through lif e . . . . Her rank determines that of her race. I f sjie be highminded and virtuous with a soul thirsting for that which is lofty, true and dis­ interested, so it is with the race.

The Lindenwood justification of its existence reflected the early nineteenth century commitment to women's education for enlightened motherhood, a status which would enable women to prepare their sons for responsible citizenship. Such sentiments were popularized and carried into the mid-century by "such educators as Horace Mann and

Henry Barnard both /p f whonV claimed to believe that i f only one sex could be educated,it should be the female, because of mothers' edu­ cational influence.

Twenty years later when the Missouri Baptist General Assembly considered adopting Baptist Female College (la te r Stephens College) as

its denominational college, a committee of the Assembly reported--

The great leading minds of the age had conceded that the "human soul has no sex." . . . Sex should not be recognized as a reason for denying woman an education, the very object of which is the improving of the soul and thergffects of which must endure through a ll eternity. 58

And the committee reminded the Assembly of woman's historical roles—

I f we recall the fact that the English literature sent forth its most vigorous shoots under the shadow of a woman's throne; i f we w ill remember that the pawned jewels of another woman secured to our race this Western Hemisphere; i f we w ill remember that woman, by her peculiar constitution, sympathies, sensibilities, tenderness, and nature is the fir s t teacher, that she takes the whole world in its infancy, when most pliable, and makes, moulds, shapes and stamps i t for weal or for woe, that she lays the foundations of human char­ acter with all its relations, interests, and destiny; if we will but learn that the world's curse will never be lifte d o ff the race until i t shall be done by woman, the daughter of her who listened to the serpant, the daughter also of her who was "given as a pride to the Holy Ghost," i f we w ill remember all of this, and more than this, we shall realize the magnitude, grandeur, solemnity, and responsibility that surrounds the ques­ tion before us. To develop woman, develop her thinking faculty, expand her heart, and help her to go forward to a more exalted future, is worthy of the loftiest ambition, exalted philanthropy and enlightened piety. . . .53

Acceptance in the mid-west of women's higher education was re­ inforced by female educational leaders. Mary Jewell, who entered the

Lindenwood College faculty as a natural science instructor in 1873, became that college's fir s t woman president, 1876-1880. Even e a rlie r, in 1863, Catherine Coleman served as vice president of that institu­ tion.^^ Luella St. Clair Moss succeeded to the presidency of Christian

College (Columbia, Missouri) when her husband died in 1893. She re­ signed the presidency because of i l l health in 1896, became financial secretary in 1898, and resumed a co-presidency of the college with

Mrs. W. I . Moore in 1899. Moss interrupted her service to Christian

College with a term as president of Hamilton College (Lexington,

Kentucky), 1903-1909. In 1909 she returned to the presidency at 59

Christian and continued in this capacity through her second marriage

(1911-1920) until her husband's death. In both institutions Moss' tenure was marked by institutional growth and financial strength.

Ellen Clara Sabin, another well-known female educator, b u ilt a strong institution out of the two women's colleges which merged in 1897 to form Milwaukee-Downer College. As president of Downer College begin­ ning in 1891, she continued as chief executive of the new college until 1921.58

Stockard's new institution, then, fell within Missouri's long tra­ dition of educating women. Most women's schools were located in the eastern or central parts of the state. Stockard, however, b u ilt her

institution in an economically active community in the west where the growing population created a need for more schools.

After winning the support of the Nevada community, Stockard moved quickly to open her school the following September. With her college

building under construction and a receptive community eagerly awaiting

the opening day of school, she confessed, "I fe lt then in the enthu­

siasm of my young womanhood, that this situation provided all that I

needed to work with. . . Her announcement to the community in

the daily newspaper declared her intentions.

Vernon Seminary Nevada, Missouri Suggests to parents seeking a genuine good school for their daughters the following points of in­ terests: Special care of the health of its pupils; thorough instruction in Music and Art, as well as in the Literary Department; Careful home-training and good moral and religious influence. For Circular Address Miss V. Cottey, Principal 60

Stockard's announcement appealed to her constituents' best interests.

She reassured them of her special care for the health of her pupils, a promise which reflected the concern of many who had been aroused by

E. H. Clarke a decade earlier. Stockard's proposal for instruction in music and art also responded to popular demands of the time. "In those early years of 'Female education', music played quite an important part," she said. "Regardless of talent every g irl who could possibly afford i t fe lt that she must have a musical education. Colleges vied with each other in being able to /o ffe r/ the greatest opportunities in this cultural branch." She quite frankly admitted, "Cottey had main­ tained an average grade in this contest and as the years passed, continued to improve.

Stockard's educational design emphasized solid academic training and healthful, moral environment. Her trin ity of values--God, home, and education-shaped the lives of those entrusted to her. The r e li­ gious foundations of her early lif e infused her college as long as she was president. She earnestly relied on her religious faith to uphold herself and the institution. "The foundation /stone^/ of Cottey were laid in prayer; the buildings were reared in fa ith ," she said. "We have endeavored to carry on the work in accordance with His cn w ill . . . ." She conveyed this fervent religious tone to her students through precept and example. Belle Douglas Logan, a Cottey

student in 1884, recalled 71 years later the impact which Stockard's

religious convictions had on her. 61

I remember that during one of those twice-a-day chapel talks, Mrs. Stockard told us she had a private room here where she went alone to pray when school problems seemed to be more than she could bear. She said she locked the door and prayed quietly until the clouds lifted and she received strength to go on again. I thought I had been over every inch of Cottey and at fir s t I couldn't figure out what room Mrs. Stockard was talking about. Then I remembered a small closet in her firs t-flo o r room which she always kept locked. One day I got up enough courage to ask Mrs. Stockard i f this was her 'quite room'. She admitted that i t was.

Stockard expected a ll those in her institution to use religious tenets as the basis for living. Of her faculty, she expected not only academic qualification, but Christian character which "measured up to the high standards that had characterized Cottey from its begin­ ning. . . . She intended that a Cottey College education would stand for academic excellence as well as "refinement and Christian character," that her school would "train and inspire young minds with ideals, right habits and a firm belief in the supremacy and inviola­ b ility of moral law."^^

Repeatedly in her writings Stockard emphasized her intention to establish a home school where she could inculcate love of home as well as Christian values.Visitors and students agreed that she achieved this end. The Reverend A. G. Dinwiddie, who visited the college in

1894, was enchanted with the Cottey atmosphere. "What a delightful home Cottey College affords for g irls! There is a sweet, gentle, home- fi7 like a ir which seems to pervade everything about the institution."

An early student, Clara E. Steger, testified that "Cottey College next to our home is the dearest place on earth to us", a place where "every 62 ,.68 interest /j^/ looked after with a mother's loving care.

Stockard considered woman to be queen of the home; consequently

the domestic element became an important aspect of her educational

plan. She had no intention, she said, to deprive "the mother the re­

sponsible duty of giving her daughter an industrial education. Rather, we would deem i t a privilege to share with her a work which in many in­

stances she is unable to perform successfully. ..." To achieve this

domestic goal she designed her program to make "habits of industry,

neatness, economy and practical housekeeping prominent points. .."of

her program.The domestic side of her program, modeled on Mary

Lyon's practices at Mount Holyoke, required each student to assume re­

sponsibility one week of each month for the housekeeping chores in

the room she shared with others. Stockard's sister, Mary Cottey, made

the inspections and recorded appropriate grades which were "as much a

part of the student's record as were the class marks in the regular

subjects.

Stockard also believed that women had a unique role to play in the

larger society. In her mission, values and school, she reflected the

female Victorian ideal which defined woman's calling as protector and

improver of moral standards.Only woman, the repository of social

morality, could assure social progress. She declared the main objec­

tive of her school was "to u p lift humanity through the medium of an 72 exalted womanhood--with which no u p lift is conceivable." She be­

lieved that her basic premises about woman's nature were commonly

accepted by the larger society. Her first catalogue felicitiously 63 declared:

Fully realizing, we trust, the great fact that God has commissioned her to be a co-laborer with Himself in the great work of enlightening and saving the world, we desire to open a school that shall have for its prime object the adjustment of woman to this her natural and God-given relation.

Although Stockard agreed with the general Victorian view that women must uphold and protect morality, her cirriculum differed signi­ ficantly from the curricula of contemporaneously founded eastern women's colleges. Other women's colleges in New England and the east coast were immitative of men's colleges and tried to prove that women could stand the rigors of education.The Seven Sisters colleges gen­ erally took pride in requiring the same entrance and graduation c rite ria as men's institutions. Stockard, on the other hand, believed

"a school for the education and training of girls demands vastly more than that which is contained in the ordinary curriculum. The moral, religious and domestic elements are a ll necessary to a symmetrical development." She believed that "the domestic element so commonly overlooked, is by no means of least importance, since upon i t depends in large measure that which give happiness and prosperity to our coun­ try-h ea lth y and happy homes." To assure her patrons "that a system of moral and religious training can be effectively combined with men­ ta l," she referred them to the examples of Rugby and Pestalozzi. She also called upon the example of Mary Lyon who "was a successful ex- 7*5 ponent of this feature of our work." 64

Mary Lyon founded Mount Holyoke, one of the earliest and most suc­ cessful women's schools, in 1837. Her program included a domestic department which supervised students' required participation in house­ hold duties. The purpose of this program was to teach students responsibility and expertise in household tasks, create a sense of unity whereby a ll members of the community worked for the common cause, and at the same time saved the institution the cost of hiring the tasks done. Stockard, who modeled Cottey College on Mount

Holyoke as she found i t described in Lyons' biography, adopted the domestic program at Cottey.

Stockard expressed the ideal toward which her students should strive by the term, exalted womanhood, her term for woman's domesti­ city directed toward extending moral influence founded on religious principles. Although her bedrock of faith lay in Methodist doctrine, she placed no expectation on her students to convert to Methodism but rather to build on the doctrine of their own denominations. In this,

Stockard was similar to Catharine Beecher who, in the 1830s, tried

"to delineate a moral theory inspired by evangelical religion but de- 77 void of its doctrinal controversies." Likewise, in Stockard's

concern that woman should reign in her domestic sphere, she agreed

with Beecher who "described the home not as the place isolating women

from political and social influence, but as the base from which their 78 influence on the rest of the culture was launched." Stockard be­

lieved that moral u p lift of society was possible only through the

moral influence of women and i t was for this duty that she prepared 65 79 her students. "Exalted womanhood," then, expressed the values of women's culture in Stockard's terms. In order to exert a moral in­ fluence, woman must have autonomy within her domestic sphere through which she would work for social u p lift by humanistic melioration of the environment.

How was exalted womanhood taught at Cottey? I t was taught by

Stockard's religious example, by the expectations and implementation of discipline at her hand, and by the intimate female relationships so common to the Victorian era which prevailed in her institution.

Throughout her 45-year presidency, non-denominational chapel ser­ vices were held at least once, and sometimes twice, a day. Generally

Stockard conducted them. Through this daily devotional she projected the religious image of exalted womanhood which she wanted her students to adopt. In 1933 Stockard's niece, Elizabeth McClure Campbell, des­ cribed such a service which exemplifies Stockard's religious model.

As we enter the door the lights are turned o ff except on the platform where she sits. Her white head is bowed, and the lig h t from above sheds a soft radiance around her. The organ, accompanied by the mellow tones of the vio lin, is playing softly. Presently the music slips into "Sweet Hour of Prayer", which the girlish voices soon take up. Then the prayer begins. I f you have never fe lt the flame on the alter of God, you will feel it now. It seems that He is sitting there beside you as the supplication goes on, and you long also to throw your incense on the fire . For those who are tempted, for those who are sorrowing, for those who have sinned, for those who are at ease in Zion, the prayer goes on. Sinful hearts become asham­ ed, and slothful souls determine to do better as they are refined in the fire of sincere devotion. There is a l i t t l e rustle as the "amen" is said and the psalm begins. I t is her favorite psalm that has become 66

the heritage of every Cottey g irl —"I w ill lif e up mine eyes unto the h ills ." Then the doxology is sung and we f ile out, awed, hushed for the feWgminutes that we have caught a glimpse of God himself.

In discipline, too, Stockard exerted her womanly influence. The same Reverend Dinwiddie who in 1894 commented on the home-like atmos­ phere at Cottey, also found that "kindness is the controlling force employed in the exercise of authority. Hence, the control is the con- 81 trol of gentleness, and the discipline is the discipline of love."

Stockard, herself, found that

the high sense of honor that pervaded both faculty and student body made discipline comparatively easy, but when an occasional wrong doer defied authority and resisted every e ffo rt to convince her and no­ thing was le ft but the supreme penalty, i t was resorted to without hesitation and always with good effect.

The "supreme penalty," expulsion from Cottey, reinforced Stockard's high expectations of her students, her faculty and herself. She de­ manded as much of herself as of any person in the college. Belle

Douglas Logan recalled, "I can s t ill hear Mrs. Stockard say to me,

'Belle, ’ never ask a person to do a thing that I wouldn't do my-

OO self.'" Possibly for this reason, she achieved instaneous results whenever her disciplinary influence became necessary whether she re­ sorted to the supreme penalty or to a lesser punishment.

An anecdote described by a student. A llie Johnston, illustrates

Stockard's disciplinary method. On a cold, snowy Sunday in the early years of the college Stockard excused the students from attending

Sunday school and church. Later that afternoon some restless students

decided upon a masquerade to relieve their confined boredom. Using 67 girlish ingenuity and whatever materials were at hand, two of them were outfitted as "Mr. and Mrs. Laudefui"--the Mrs. in a white dress and hat with ribbons and flowers, and the Mr. in white pantaloons, red stockings and red blouse. The parade of Mr. and Mrs. Laudefui through neighboring student rooms brought shreeks of laughter, Johnston recalled.

While in the midst of i t , oh horrors. Miss Cottey stepped in. You ought to have seen the culprits. She stood and looked at them for what seemed a long time, a small eternity in fact, and then said, "What day is this?" Nobody vouchsafed an answer, and after gazing sadly at them she le f t the room. The girls then went to their rooms sadder and wiser than a few minutes before.

Discipline, restraint and guidance were Stockard's principles of stu­ dent governance, but she considered these in no way "opposed to a proper interpretation of that much abused term --self expression.

Dr. Miriam Gray, a student from the mid-1920s, recalled that "We were under this very strict discipline but at the same time. . . we had. . . lots of leaway. . . we were allowed to be individuals and go our own way." To Gray, who referred to herself as "a rather indepen­ dent soul," the discipline was not s tiflin g . "Whatever restrictions there were I don't remember--they didn't cramp my style.

Religious precept and the firm hand of discipline were not in themselves sufficient to imbue students with the s p irit of exalted womanhood. Possibly no other means for teaching this ideal was as im­

portant as the intimate relationships which characterized the

institution. Cottey was a woman's world. Only the jan itor and one of 68 the faculty members intruded the male presence into this female atmo­ sphere. Numerous rules shielded Cottey students. They were prohibited from receiving mail from anyone who had not previously been approved by

Stockard. They could receive visitors only with her permission. They were not permitted social liaisons with men nor were they permitted to 87 receive male attentions in "parlor dates". Students left campus only in a group and then only when chaperoned by a faculty member, but they s t ill found ways to f l i r t at a distance with town boys. These flirta tio n s , however, were never permitted to intrude upon the func­ tioning women's world within the walls of Cottey.

What Stockard succeeded in establishing was an extended version of the Victorian family. In this world, women and men enjoyed separate spheres among their own sex and reserved relations with the other sex to highly controlled and structured circumstances. The women's world

at Cottey was a world of women teaching women. This extended far be­ yond the academic, cultural and domestic subjects of the curriculum.

In the intimacies of daily living exalted womanhood was taught and

learned. A student who enrolled in 1884 recalled,

In the second year there came into our school home. Mother Cottey, more fam iliarly known, as Grandma Cottey, also Miss Kate Cottey, sister of Mrs. Stockard and her niece Miss Rose Cottey. How we loved to gather about Grandma Cottey andghave her te ll us stories of her young girlhood.

This intimate homelike atmosphere combined with the daily fea­

tures of living to develop Cottey students into exalted women. To a

great extent this training for womanhood took place outside of the 69 classroom. From the opening day of Cottey in 1884 until the fir s t separate residence hall was opened in 1939, Cottey teachers and stu­ dents shared living space. After about 1903 when the suite plan was in itiated , teachers occupied one room in each set of single rooms for students which surrounded a common living room. For about the fir s t twenty years of the college, however, teachers and students shared rooms. Four persons occupied each room, and Stockard made roommate selections based on positive results she hoped to achieve by combining various personalities. Cooperative living was essential in these rooms furnished with two beds, two dressers, one closet, and a coal stove to provide heat, a typical living arrangement in women's col- 89 leges of that period. The desired results were not always achieved.

Mamie Taylor, who enrolled in 1887, recalled that she, Dora Cottey, and another student were assigned to a room with a third student named Annie in the hopes of making some reform in Annie's personality.

Annie and I slept together and . . . I can see her ta ll lanky form tempestuously diving into bed and unceremoniously fanning me with the covers which she grabbed and held alo ft as she made her leap. So far as I am aware not one tiny dent was ever madeg^ either of us upon the character of the other.

Even more than students' relationships with each other, the fac­ ulty relationship with students conveyed many small details for successfully reaching womanhood. Taylor recalls the influence of Dora

Cottey.

But I can only trust that Miss Dora's kindly friend­ liness, her neat, cleanly ways, and her conscientious high minded attitudes did as much for Annie as for me. For Miss Dora taught me, in the l i t t l e 70

intimacies of rooming together, so many more things than in the classroom. . . . How well I do remember the l i t t l e confidential chats we had when alone. Her confidence gave me a b it of needed assurance and a feeling of elation to be trusted. During these weeks of close association she instilled in my mind many healthy attitudes and fine ideals and won my lasting admiration and devotion. And how clearly I recall her successful instruction in the art of taking a morning bath from a wash bowl in the presence of o th e rs--sk illfu lly encough to enjoy the bath and for­ get the audience (which in my day ofgthe modest young woman was no slight accomplishment).

The sometimes intense nature of teacher-student relationships is reflected in letters writted by A llie Johnston who attended Cottey in its early years.

This is visiting evening and I am going to see Miss Dora. How good Miss Dora is to me. When I get a ner­ vous spell she rubs my head and understands me so well and when her cool hand touches me the choke goes out of my throat. When I was sick she came and slept with me, took me to her room and was so good. She is so strong when she touches me, and her nature is ten­ derer than ever I guessed.

Dear Miss Kate is sick tonight. I can’ t express my love for Miss Kate. She is so sweet.

Miss Cottey was so good to me while I was sick with the measles. No one could have been kinder or more gentle. To have Miss Cottey come near when one is sick is a very benediction. Miss Ball was kind too, and read about half of John Halifax aloud.

.... Thursday night I went downstairs to the sick room to stay t i l l study hall because the wind blew so awfully in our room. Well, Miss Cottey came and wouldn't le t me go to study hall but made me go to bed in there, saying the wind was so bad I wouldn't sleep a wink up­ stairs.

Taylor's and Johnston's reminiscences reflect the nature of Vic­

torian women's relationships with each other—relationships which. 71 although intense, were ''both socially acceptable and fu lly compatible 93 with heterosexual marriage." Women's homosocial relationships grew in the bifurcated Victorian women's and men's spheres.

American society was characterized in large part by rigid gender-role differentiation within the family and within society as a whole, leading to the emo­ tional segregation of women and men. . . . a specifically female world did indeed develop, a world b u ilt around a generic and unself-conscious pattern of single-sex or homosocial networks. These supportive networks were institutionalized in social conventions or rituals which accompanied virtu ally every important event in a woman's lif e , from birth to death. Such female relationships were frequently supported and paralleled by severe social restrictions on intimacy between young men and women. Within such a world of emotional richness and complexity devotion to and love of other women became a plausible.and socially accepted form of human interaction.

Such "sentimental friendships" or "romantic friendships" originated as a social phenomenon not in the nineteenth century but as early as 95 the Renaissance. By the nineteenth century, however,

deeply fe lt friendships between women were casually accepted in American society, primarily because wo­ men saw themselves, and were seen as, kindred spirits who inhabited a world of interests and sensibilities alien to men. During the second half of the nine­ teenth century, when women began to enter the world that men had built, |heir ties to each other became even more important.

Boarding school romantic friendships were looked upon with to ler­

ant regard as described by William R. Alger in his book. The Friendships

of Women, published in 1868.

School g irl friendships are a proverb in a ll mouths. They form one of the largest classes of those human attachments whose idealizing power and sympathetic interfusions glorify the world and sweeten our exis­ tence. With what quick trust and ardor, what eager relish, these susceptible creatures, before whom 72

heavenly illusions flo a t, surrender themselves to each other, taste all the raptures of confidential conver­ sation, l i f t veil after veil t i l l every secret is bare, and, hand in-band, with glowing feet, tread the paths of paradise!

Such romantic friendships were common experiences to nineteenth cen­ tury school girls and college women, and frequently continued 98 throughout the lifetim e of the romantic partners. The women at

Cottey, like their Victorian sisters elsewhere, developed strong bonds with each other in the course of their brief residence in the intimate and supportive environment at the college.

Thus developed the Victorian women's family at Cottey College.

Stockard maintained a mother's eye over a ll details of college opera­ tion and activities. She, her sisters, and other faculty provided strong, loving role-models for the young women enrolled in the college.

I t was these intimate personal relationships combined with the aca­ demic, cultural and domestic training which Stockard hoped would produce exalted women who would enlighten and save the world. Almost f if t y years after she opened the college she continued to identify the purposes of Cottey in moral terms. I t existed, she said, to prepare women for useful livin g , to enable women to live in such a way as to

improve the world by their living, and "to save our citizenship in so

far as their influence extended, from fraud, deceipt, indolence, super­

ficiality, and infidelity."^^

Stockard gave her students a firm foundation of women's values

and women's culture to which she added a liberal arts education. The

curriculum and degrees offered were from the beginning designed to 73 meet women's needs. Only gradually, over a period of 30 years, was the curriculum redesigned to conform to standards established by ex­ ternal agencies. In 1914 the collegiate division at Cottey was reorganized as a junior college and accredited by the University of

Missouri. Separate departments continued: the Conservatory of Music,

Department of Domestic Science and Art, Department of Expression,

Physical Culture and Dramatic Art, and the Department of Art.^^^ Cur­ riculum reform continued even after accreditation by the North Central

Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools in 1941.

Of the fir s t degrees offered, the Mistress of Literature degree provided a solid liberal arts education. Courses required in mathe­ matics were algebra, geometry, and trigonometry; in science they were botany, chemistry, physiology, geology, and astronomy; in philosophy the required courses were natural philosophy, mental philosophy, logic, and rhetoric. Students also were required to complete a Latin course,

French or German, English litera tu re, and a course on evidences of

Christianity. The Mistress of Arts degree required the same courses as the M. L. degree, and added analytical geometry, calculus, both

French and German, and ancient and foreign literature.^^^

From the beginning Stockard planned to include teacher education

as part of her program, and training for teachers was listed in the

fir s t catalogue. The primary department at.the institution served as

a practice teaching laboratory under supervision of experienced

teachers. The 1916-1917 catalogue indicated that students completing

twelve hours of education courses as part of their 60 college hours 74 could qualify for a state teachers' certificate which qualified a 102 teacher, without examination, for three years. Cottey continued to produce teachers until after Stockard's retirement from the presidency.

In addition to academic courses, Stockard expected a ll students to participate in four other areas as part of th eir education. Reli­ gious and moral training required daily Bible reading, attendance at church and at twice-daily chapel. Domestic training not only included responsibility for one week out of every month for keeping the dormi­ tory room in proper order, but also included sewing classes. These handiwork classes were scheduled for Saturday afternoons in order not to interfere with academic classes. In 1891, a culinary department 103 was added. Required courses in physical culture promoted sound health. These courses included outdoor exercise as well as daily cal- isthenics.^^^ Extra-curricular activities also played an essential role in the education of young women. Literary societies and a mis­ sionary society were organized early in the college's history. A chapter of the Young Women's Christian Association played an important role in the lif e of the college.

Thus, the education for young women offered at Cottey College was designed to meet the unique needs of women. A solid academic program combined with religious, moral and domestic training were to prepare a woman for her God-given role of enlightening and saving the world.

Throughout the history of the college, a sound liberal arts course re­ mained the foundation of Cottey's educational program. Other elements of the college were changed and altered to complement the liberal 75 arts, to more fu lly meet educational requirements of women, and fin a lly to meet requirements of external accreditation agencies. '!hen in 1895 the degrees were changed from mistress to bachelor's degrees, i t was only a change of degree name and not a change of requirements.

Cottey College, in its early years, was very much a family a ffa ir.

Of the four faculty members who bravely faced the fir s t students in

September 1884, only one was not a member of the Cottey family. In its dependence on one family for leadership, Cottey resembled other educa­ tional institutions of its day. When Catharine Beecher established

Hartford Female School in 1823 she enjoyed the support and participa­ tion of several of her brothers and sisters as students and 1 nfi teachers. In a like manner, many members of Charles Lewis Cocke's family participated as administrators and teachers of Hollins College from the time Cocke assumed the presidency in 1846 until Matty L. 107 Cocke retired as president in 1933. Closer at hand to Cottey, sev­ eral members of The Reverend Ernest Wentworth Dow's family worked with him at Grand River College, Gallatin, Missouri, when he was president there, 1914-1918.^®^ One of his daughters who taught at G allatin,

Blanche Hinman Dow, became president of Cottey in 1949.

Olive N. Harrison, instructor of music, came to the fir s t Cottey faculty with Stockard from Central College at Lexington, Missouri.

The other three faculty members were Stockard, who fille d the position of principal and teacher of languages and ethics, Dora Cottey, who taught mathematics, elocution and calisthenics, and Mary Cottey who 76 taught painting, drawing and served as principal of the primary depart­ ing ment. Family members continued to play an important role in the

Cottey faculty in these early years. Dora taught at the institution until she married in 1888. Mary le ft the college only in 1902 when she married. Another sister, Kate, came to the college as a special stu­ dent of music in 1885, became vice president and bookkeeper in 1892, and fin a lly le ft the college when she married in 1900. Two of

Stockard's nieces also served in her institution. Rose Cottey, the daughter of her brother William, came to the college as a student assistant in the primary department in 1886. She was the second grad­ uate of the college in 1888, and remained at the institution in a teaching capacity, with a one-year leave for study at the University of

Chicago in 1900-1901, until her death in 1917. Elizabeth McClure, daughter of Dora, taught Latin at Cottey in the 1917-1918 academic year and returned to the college after she was married and widowed to teach

English for several years after 1926. Two of Stockard's step-children also taught at Cottey. When John Stockard graduated from Vanderbilt

University in 1898 he returned to Cottey and taught English and Greek.

Kate Stockard taught music at Cottey in the 1899-1900 academic year.

After two years of study in Belgium, she returned to campus and again

taught music from 1902-1903.^^^

The size of the faculty gradually grew from the original four to a

staff which regularly numbered 16-18. As her family members moved away

from the college, Stockard increasingly depended on other individuals--

women whom she drew from the early generations of college-educated 77 women. Two years before she retired from the college, in the academic year 1927-1928, the faculty had 16 members who taught college courses or college and high school courses. Information on professional quali­ fications is unavailable for three of these individuals. On the remaining 13, one had attended Cottey as a student in the years 1913-

1916 and completed one year at the Nevada Business College in 1916-1917 before returning to Cottey to teach business courses. Another teacher reported she earned her associate in arts degree from Cottey in 1894 and in 1927-1928 served as librarian and teacher of algebra and geome­ try. Of the remaining eleven faculty, five had earned masters degrees in their teaching field.Although many of the faculty had earned degrees at Missouri institutions, others had studied at such in stitu ­ tions as the University of Nebraska, the University of Michigan,

Middlebury College in Vermont, Washburn College, Bethany College,

Kansas State Agricultural College, and Northwestern University. If the date of earning a degree is an indication of age, most of the faculty in 1927-1928 were in their twenties or early thirties. Lutie

Petty Key, the lib rarian, was the oldest (probably about 52 years old) having earned her junior college degree at Cottey in 1894. About three-quarters of the faculty had graduate study beyond the degree they held.

Far from representing narrow provincial backgrounds, which one might expect of teachers at such a remote location, faculty members at Cottey brought diverse experiences with them to the college. The diversity, described below, enlivened the academic and social lif e on 78 campus, and further, presented dynamic role models for the young stu­ dents. Edna Kobs, who received her bachelor's and master's degrees from the University of Missouri, and who taught college chemistry and botany and high school biology, spent the summer of 1927 travelling in 112 England, Holland, Belgium, France, Switzerland and Germany. Mary

Catharine Floyd, who taught college French and Spanish, had perhaps the most diverse academic background of a ll of the faculty. She attended the University of South Carolina for three years before transferring to the University of Michigan in 1924 to complete her bachelor's degree.

She earned her M. A. degree from Middlebury College in Middlebury, Ver- most in 1925-1926. Floyd also had travelled in Europe in 1927, spent three weeks in study at the University of Grenoble, France, and plan­ ned another study tour to Spain and the University of Grenoble in the 113 summer of 1928. The home economics teacher, Florence R. Whipple, had worked for ten years with the Division of Extension of Kansas

State Agricultural College at Manhattan. The fir s t six of these years were devoted to boys' and g irls ' club work. From 1919-1923 she served as Club Agent and Home Demonstration Agent in Kansas under the Division

of Extension.Altogether the thirteen faculty for whom background

information is available for the year, 1928, brought to the college an

average of eight-and-one-half years of teaching experience which in- 115 eluded both high school and college teaching posts.

In the earliest years of the college, teachers carried many re­

sponsibilities in addition to classroom instruction. They were

expected to preside over an assigned dining table at every meal, to 79 attend all college worship services, "to create a helpful and uplift­ ing moral atmosphere" in the suite in which they lived, and to promote discipline and the best interests of the college. All of this re- qured cooperation with the president and s tric t loyalty to the college.

Such requirements of teachers were listed in the catalogue through

1 1 1916. Although after that date teachers' duties no longer were publicized in the catalogue, their duties changed little as long as

Stockard remained president.

Twenty-eight students appeared at Stockard's door when she opened her college on September 8, 1884. Twelve of the students were board­ ing students. By the end of the fir s t school year, 72 students attended classes.Vernon Seminary (Cottey College) from the begin­ ning included an elementary school, an academy or high school, and a college. The fir s t year's enrollment came from Montana, Texas and

Indiana as well as Missouri. This national spread became a typical aspect of student enrollment at Cottey College and has continued throughout the institution's existence. Students came from at least six states other than Missouri and sometimes as many as eleven other states in any one academic year. In the ten-year period, 1918-1928,

Missouri students always represented more than half of the enrollment.

Most of these came from Vernon County surrounding the in stitutio n. In the fir s t 25 years the enrollment varried from 24 to 280. The students came from 27 states and three foreign countries, Canada, Mexico and 118 China. Exact enrollment figures are not available for any period of the college's early history except for the fir s t three years. 80

Stockard indicated that her enrollment in 1884 was 28, in 1885 was

73, and in 1886 was 86. In the eleven-year period prior to her re­ tirement from the presidency, enrollment fluctuated from a low of 130 in 1918-1919 to a high of 181 in 1927-1928.^^^ These figures reflect only academy and college enrollment and do not include the elementary school which accounted for approximately 100 more students.

Considering a ll aspects of Cottey College, lif e among the students is the one area which probably changed least throughout the years.

Daily routine may have changed, but the student s p irit and way of life seem unchanged from decade to decade. From the beginning, some stu­ dents earned part of their tuition on service grants or regular work projects. Belle Douglas Logan, who was an eighth grade student at

Cottey in 1884, helped pay her tuition costs by "cleaning the chimnies and keeping the wicks trimmed on coal o il lamps that hung in brackets outside fir s t floor doors in what is now Main Hall. She also helped 12fl the four Cottey sisters clean the fir s t floor rooms and halls."

Student pranks always have been an element of Cottey lif e . Addie

Evans, who entered Cottey in 1884, recalled that the moral philosophy class which Stockard taught knew that i f they were unprepared for class 121 they could divert her attention by raising the issue of dancing.

Although Stockard opposed dancing in these early years, she later per­ mitted dances to be held on campus. 81

Every rule was a challenge to be broken, often with a feat of daring. Miriam Gray, president of Phi Theta Kappa honor society in

1925, recalled that "I became known as the human fly for a very good 122 reason." Lights-out at night was the signal for students to remain

in their own rooms and to get th eir night's rest. Of course to the

students the challenge was to v is it a friend's room without being dis­

covered by the faculty member who lived in the suite. Gray's method

was to climb out her window and step from window s ill to sindow s ill

until she reached her friend's room. The facts that she lived on the

second floor of Rosemary Hall over the auditorium and that the windows

were a long stretch apart did not daunt her."I've always been a b it

of a dare devil," she said. "Heights never bothered me and. . . i t 12T was really very easy to do at. . . that time...." Less daring

students scrambled for a quick escape in a closet or under the bed to 124 avoid detection by the supervising faculty member.

Student activities and organizations also follow a typical pattern

through the years. An annual fa ll outing gave the students a one-day

break from the academic routine at the peak of autumn splendor. In

the earliest years this took the form of a nutting party usually held

in October. Students and faculty arose early, climbed into horse-

drawn wagons, and set out for one of the local streams. While the

students collected nuts, faculty members prepared the picnic lunbh.

The day was marked by warm companionship, college songs and class y e lls .125 82

Typical of late nineteenth-century college campuses, lite ra ry societies were popular among Cottey students in the early years. The fir s t litera ry society was organized in 1888. In 1894 the Urania

Society and the Vesta Society announced their organizations in the col­ lege chapel. A program of instrumental and vocal music and addresses by the two society presidents marked the event. The Vestal Virgins, whose colors were pink and green, gave a ll members of the audience a four-leafed clover souvenir. The Urania Society gave souvenirs of small golden stars. Each society declared its motto: the Vesta

Society, "Ad Astra," and the Urania Society, "Step by Step We Gain the 1 nc Heights." By 1904 the Vesta and Urania societies had been replaced by the Ralph Waldo Emerson and Magnoperian Societies. These two soci- 127 eties continued into the late part of the century. 1894 also marks the extra-curricular organization of classes and election of officers.

In that same year the YWCA was organized and student delegated attend­ ing ed a state convention at Springfield, Missouri.

One of Stockard's most prized student organiztions was the college 129 missionary society organized as early as 1890. At least four Cottey students fu lfille d her vision of women going out and saving the world.

Clara E. Steger, who graduated in 1893, was the fir s t Cottey mission­

ary. She served as president of the college missionary society for

three years and after graduation served as a Methodist missionary in 130 China from 1894 to 1934. Another noted missionary from Cottey was

Irma Highbaugh who graduated in 1912. She served forty years in the

Far East; from 1917-1942 she worked in China and then worked in the 83

Philippines, Japan, Korea, Burma, Malaya, Thailand, Indonesia and Ceylon.131

Missionary interest and activity declined through the years a l­ though teaching and homemaking remained occupations entered by many

Cottey alumnae. The Cottey College Chronicle of June, 1894, listed a ll available addresses and occupations of Cottey alumnae since the

fir s t class graduated in 1887, but the only occupation listed was that 132 of teacher. In 1928 Stockard described her graduates as "teachers, 133 Christian workers and home makers." Information collected on 375 alumnae from the period 1920-1930, indicates that as of 1931, 40 per­

cent were engaged in teaching, and almost 50 percent were engaged in

homemaking; 10 percent were in seven different unspecified occupa­ tions. ^3^

Clearly Stockard materialized her motivating mission in founding

Cottey College. The curriculum she moulded was designed as a woman's

training program which incorporated women's cultural values. Even the

early degrees she awarded were Mistress rather than Bachelor degrees.

Stockard's concern that women effectively fu lfill their role in soci­

ety later was shared by the historian, Mary R itter Beard. Beard

insisted that women's acceptance of male-defined higher education sub­

verted their education for womanhood and thereby undermined their 135 ability to fu lfill woman's functions in society. When speaking to

the Mount Holyoke centennial in 1937, Beard posed the choice presented

to women in higher education: either accept men's values of sheer

force and the rationalization of its emotions, or strive for women's 84 values of humanism with intuitive insight into moral and esthetic 136 values. In her own way this is what Stockard sought to achieve.

Her object was not rejection of male values, but rather encouragement of women's values. This was perfectly compatible with the Victorian mileau in which she lived "characterized in large part by rigid gender- role differentiation within the family and within society as a whole, 137 leading to the emotional segregation of women and men." The extent of her emphasis on women's values is illustrated by her participation in the "College Presidents for Women in Missouri" which, in this gilded age of robber-barons, drew up a code of ethics to structure and lim it competition among the women's colleges in Missouri. Forty years later, women's business values were sim ilarly reflected by cooperation among the Seven Sister colleges in the East. The Alumnae Committee of Seven

Colleges, organized in 1927 to increase endowments of the participat­ ing colleges, substituted cooperation for competition and was "a 138 purely feminine contribution to academic life ."

Stockard considered various possibilities for perpetuating her college. At one time, she gave i t to the Methodist Church but quickly withdrew her offer when she learned the church planned a consolida­

tion program which would close many of its schools. In 1922, at age

74, she attempted to re tire . She hired J. C. Harmon as president but

retained ownership of the college. Harmon was unsuccessful in main­

taining a sound financial standing for the in stitu tio n , and twenty-two

months after Stockard retired she resumed the presidency and Harmon

le ft campus. Two years la te r, in 1926, Stockard was in itiated into the 85

P. E. 0. Sisterhood and soon realized that the Sisterhood was the an­ swer to her problem. P. E. 0. objectives, established by the founders

in 1869 and perpetuated through the years, reflected womanly qualities which Stockard also emulated.

First; to seek growth in charity towards a ll with whom we associate.

Second: a just comprehension of and adherence to the qualities of Faith, Love, Purity, Justice, and Truth.

Third: to seek growth in knowledge and culture and to obtain all possible wisdom from nature, art, books, study and society, and to radiate a ll lig h t possible by conversation, by writing, and by the right exercise of any talent we possess.

Fourth: to aim at self-control, equipoise and symmetry of character, and temperance in opinions, speech and habits.

Stockard wasted no time in proposing transfer of Cottey to the Sister­

hood. She made her formal proposal to the Supreme Convention which

met at Oklahoma City in 1927. P. E. 0. should accept the college, she

said, "F irst, because the origin and object of P. E. 0. and Cottey

College are strangely similar. Second, i t w ill certainly be a great

asset to the educational work you aredoing.The convention ac­

cepted the donation and Stockard le ft the meeting confident that her

life's work would be carried on.

Part of Stockard's agreement with P. E. 0. required her to con­

tinue at Cottey for a two-year transition period. At last in 1929, at

age 81, she retired with thanksgiving for the past and confidence for

the future.

And now that I am resigning from the presidency, giving up the responsibility that has absorbed me for 86

forty-five years, there is no tinge of sadness or regret in my heart, but a great swelling flood of joy that I have been permitted to commit the work of my lif e into the hands of the P. E. 0. Sisterhood, the organization whose great objective is the education of young women whose standards.and ideals are so similar to those of Cottey. . . .

As President Emerita, Stockard continued her active interest in college affairs. Living in Stockard House just across the street from the college, she was in a position to dominate the situation. Instead,

however, she seemed content to permit the professional administrators

free reign to manage affairs as they thought best. Although well aware of her presence, neither of the presidents who served while she was

s t ill alive complained about meddling on her part. In her retirement

she was made an honorary member of Delta Kappa Gamma, a society of 142 women educators. In 1930 Iowa Wesleyan College conferred on her 143 the L. L. D. degree. After so many years of serving others, she

had to admit, "I have always wanted a hood."^^^

On December 29, 1934, at age 86, she suffered a severe heart 145 attack. Nonetheless, she recovered sufficiently to participate in

Founder's Day celebrations of her birthday and other special events

for several more years. When the cornerstone of the new student resi­

dence, P. E. 0. Hall, was laid in 1939 she was there, but she was

unable to attend dedication of the building thatautumn.Then,

July 16, 1940, after 56 years of nurturing her creation, she died at

Stockard House.She had followed the dictum learned at her father's

knee—"Daughter. . .1 want you to be a teacher"--and for virtu ally all

of her 92 years she was intimately involved in educational work. 87

Virginia Alice Cottey Stockard was reared in an environment of strong religious convictions. Born in 1848, she fe lt the strictures of Victorian society which confined her to woman's sphere. Further lim iting her world was her family’ s remote homestead in rural Missouri.

Such limitations prevented her from earning the education which her parents wanted for a ll of their nine children. Stockard, however, overcame her narrow horizons largely through self-education and an iron willpower. By the time she was 36, inspired by a biography of Mary

Lyon, she prepared to launch her own women's college.

Cottey College, founded in 1884, absorbed Stockard's energy throughout the remainder of her long lif e . She envisioned the college as a means to promote and perpetuate her concept of exalted womanhood, a concept representative of nineteenth century women's cultural values.

Exalted womanhood placed on women the responsibility to serve as moral uplifters of society. I t vas a secular concept founded on strong religious convictions and a belief that woman was chosen by God for this service. To train her students for this God-given duty Stockard created a woman's world separate from the larger society. At the same time that she educated her students at Cottey for exalted womanhood, the students enjoyed the intimacy and security of women's sphere so typical of the Victorian era, an environment in which they nurtured lasting ties to each other and to women's values. Stockard taught her students to be strong, autonomous women who as a matter of course would u p lift society and meliorate inhumane conditions they might encounter.

Thus, she participated in the women's cultural tradition of Mary Lyon 88 and Catharine Beecher. Like Lyon and Beecher, Stockard committed her lif e to perpetuating women's values through education, and in this was her contribution to womankind. The following chapter w ill describe how women's culture continued to flourish at Cottey after Stockard donated the college to the P. E. 0. Sisterhood in 1927. NOTES FOR CHAPTER I I I

1. Elizabeth McClure Campbell, The Cottey Sisters of Missouri, (Park- v ille , Missouri: Park College Press, 1970), pp. 21, 285-286.

2. Campbell, Cottey, pp. 284-285.

3. Campbell, Cottey, pp. 2-3.

4. Campbell, Cottey, p. 17.

5. Campbell, Cottey, pp. 286-287.

6. /Virginia Alice Cottey Stockar^/, "A History of the Origins and Growth of Cottey College at Nevada Missouri" MS, C. 1937, Record Group 3, Cottey College Archives, p. 7.

7. /^Stockar^/, "A History of the Origins," p. 8.

8. /Virginia Alice Cottey Stockar^/, "History of Cottey College" MS, C. 1937, RB3, CCA, /p. 4/.

9. Campbell, Cottey, p. 38.

10. Campbell, Cottey, pp. 38-39.

11. Campbell, Cottey, p. 41.

12. /^Stockar^/, "A History of the Origins," p. 15.

13. Campbell, Cottey, p. 43.

14. /Stockar^Z, "A History of the Origins," p. 16.

15. Campbell, Cottey, pp. 51-52.

16. /Virginia Alice Cottey Stockar^Z, "Story of Cottey College," Appendix A, "A Survey of Cottey College," by Joseph Deliver Ell i f f , (1938), RG3. CCA. p. 42.

17. Z^tockardZ, "Story of Cottey," p. 42.

18. /JtockardZ, "History of Cottey".

89 90

19. /^Stockard/j "A History of the Origins," pp. 12-13.

20. /^Stockard/, "A History of the Origins," pp. 4-5.

21. Campbell, Cottey, pp. 286-287.

22. Campbell, Cottey, p. 108.

23. R. M. C. /Rose M. Cottey/, "In Memorium," Cottey College Chronicle, 6:2 (January 1897), p. 11, CCA.

24.Campbell, Cottey, p. 121.

25. /^Stockard/, "A History of the Origins," pp. 16-17.

26. /Stockar^/, "A History of the Origins," pp. 17-18.

27. Gerda Lerner, "The Lady and the M ill G irl," reprinted in The Majority Finds Its Past: Placing Women in History, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979).

28. Katharyn Kish Sklar, Catharine Beecher: A Study in American Domes­ tic it y , (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, In c., 1973), p. 113.

29. Campbell, Cottey, p. 67.

30. History of Vernon County Missouri, (St. Louis: Irown and Company, 1887, p. 595.

31. U. S., Department of the In terior, Census Office. Compendium of the Tenth Census of the United States: 1880, (Washington: Government Printing Office, 188317 pp. 40, 213; U. S. Department of Commerce, Fifteenth Census of the United States: 1930, Vol. I , Population: Number and Distribution of Inhabitants, (Washington: U. S. Government Printing Office, 1981), pp. 603, 621; U. S. Department of In terio r, Census Office, Abstract of the Twelfth Census of the United States: 1900, (Washington: U. S. Government Printing Office, 1902), p. 142.

32. J. 3. Johnson, Ed., History of Vernon County Missouri, Vol. I , (Chicago: C. F. Cooper and Company, 1911), p. 446.

33. Johnson, History, Vol. I, p. 446.

34. Johnson, History, Vol. I , pp. 447-448.

35. Johnson, History, Vol. I , p. 453.

36. Johnson, History, Vol. I , p. 425.

37. Johnson, History, Vol. I , p. 430. 91

38. Johnson, History, Vol. I , pp. 427-428.

39. History of Vernon County, p. 379.

40. Dick B. Clough, "Teachers' Institutes: A Missouri Tradition," Missouri Historical Review, 67: 4 (July 1973), p. 528.

41. Clough, "Teachers' Institutes," p. 524.

42. Johnson, History, Vol. I , p. 404.

43. Johnson, History, Vol. I , pp. 408-409, 411.

44. Campbell, Cottey, p. 67.

45. Campbell, Cottey, pp. 68-69.

46. Campbell, Cottey. pp. 69-70. ^

47. Campbell, Cottey, p. 72.

48. Jean Tyree Hamilton, "Mr. Bingham's Tombstone," Missouri Historical Review, 73: 4 (July 1979), p. 430.

49. John Crighton, "The Columbia Female Academy: A Pioneer in Education for Women," Missouri Historical Review, 64: 2 (January 1970), pp. 179- 180.

50. Crighton, "Columbia," pp. 177-196.

51. Lucinda deLeftwich Tempi in, Some Defects and Merits in the Educa­ tion of Women in Missouri : An Analysis of Past and Present Educational Methods and a^ Proposal for the Future. (/^Columbia/: University of Missouri, 1926), J3. 100.

52. Linda K. Kerber, "Daughters of Columbia: Educating Women for the Republic, 1787-1805," in Our American Sisters: Women in American Life and Thought, Eds. Jean E. Friedman and William G. Shade, 2nd Edition, iBoston: Allyn and Bacon, In c., 1976), p. 89.

53. Nancy F. Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: "Woman's Sphere" in New England, 1780-1835,~TNew Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), p. 97.

54. Templin, Some, p. 72.

55. Templin, Some, pp. 72-73.

56. Templin, Some, p. 106. 92

57. "Missouri Women in History: Lue!la St. Clair Moss," Missouri Historical Review, 65: 3 (April 1971), Inside back cover.

58. Grace Norton Kieckhefer, The History of Milwaukee-Downer College, 1851-1951, (Milwaukee: Milwaukee-Downer College, 1950), p. 60.

59. /Stockar^7s "A History of the Origins," p. 19.

60. The /Nevada, Missouri/ Daily Mail, 18 June-10 September 1884.

61. /Ytockar^/, "History of Cottey," /p. \lj •

62. /Jtockar^/, "Story of Cottey," p. 47.

63. Virginia Watson, "That Rare Cottey Heritaae," P_. £. 0. Record, 67: 6 (June 1955), p. 17.

64. /Ytockar^/, "History of Cottey," /p. 20/.

65. /Stockar^/, "A History of the Origins," pp. /4 & /, 4.

66. See: /^Stockar^/, "A History of the Origins," and "History of Cottey," passim.

67. Cottey College Chronicle 3: 9 (June 1894), /p. ^7-

68. C. E. S., "Editorial," Cottey College Chronicle, /June 189^/.

69. "Early History of Cottey College, 1884-1908," "Curriculum Commit­ tee, 1937-1946," RG4, CCA; Virginia Alice Cottey Stockard, speech fragment, C. 1934, RG3, CCA.

70. Campbell, Cottey, p. 83.

71. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, "The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations between Women in Nineteenth Century America," Signs, 1: 1 (Autumn 1975); Nancy F. Cott, "Passionlessness: An Interpretation of Victorian Sexual Ideology, 1790-1850," Signs, 4: 2 (Winter, 1978); Ruth H. uloch, "Untangling the Roots of Modern Sex Roles: A Survey of Four Centuries of Change," Signs, 4: 2 (Winter, 1978).

72. /Ytockar^, "A History of the Origins," p. 24.

73. /8tockar^7, speech fragment, C. 1934.

74. Adele Simmons, "Education and Ideology in Nineteenth Century America: The Response of Educational Institutions to the Changing Role of Women," in Liberating Women's History: Theoretical and Critical Essays, Ed. Berenice A. Carroll, (Urbana: University of Illin o is Press, 1976), pp. 117-118. 93

75. /StockaN /, speech fragment, C. 1934.

76. Elizabeth Alden Green, Mary Lyon and Mount Holyoke: Opening the Gates, (Hanover, New Hampshire; University Press of New England, Î9797, pp. 176-181.

77. Sklar, Catharine Beecher, p. 127.

78. Sklar, Catharine Beecher, p. 137.

79. See N.69, supra.

80. Elizabeth McClure Campbell, "A Teacher Looks at Cottey," £. £. 0. Record, 45: 10, (October 1933), p. 13.

81. Dinwiddie, Cottey College Chronicle, 3: 9 (June 1894), /p .ÿ.

82. /Stockar^/, "History of Cottey," /p. 20/.

83. Watson, "That Rare," p. 16.

84. Campbell, Cottey, pp. 90-91.

85. /Jtockard/, "A History of the Origins," p. 4.

86. Dr. Miriam Gray, Nevada, Missouri, oral history interview with Adele Ausink at Cottey College, Nevada, Missouri, 7 November 1979.

87. /ÏÏr. Lucy Harmoji/, "Some Recollections of Cottey College," [Z. 1934/, RG3, CCA.

88. Addie Evans, "Memories of Cottey College," 2- i - Record, 47: 3, (March 1935), p. 7.

89. Campbell, Cottey, p. 81; Faderman, Surpassing, p. 147.

90. Campbell, Cottey, p. 85.

91. Campbell, Cottey, p. 85.

92. Campbell, Cottey, pp. 89-90.

93. Smith-Rosenberg, "The Female World," p. 8.

94. Smith-Rosenberg, "The Female World," p. 9.

95. Faderman, Surpassing, p. 16.

96. Faderman, Surpassing, p. 160.

97. Quoted in Faderman, Surpassing, p. 279. 94

98. Smith-Rosenberg, "The Female World," passim. For elaboration on romantic attachments between college women see Nancy Sahli, "Smashing: women's Relationships before the Fall," Chrysalis 8 (Summer 1979), pp. 17-27.

99. Virginia A. C. Stockard, "The Purpose of Cottey," P. E. 0. Record, 44: 3 (March 1932), p. 3.

100. Orpha Stockard, The First 75 Years, (Nevada, Missouri: Cottey College, 1961), p. 36.

101. Stockard, First 75, p. 15.

102. Stockard, First 75, p. 37.

103. "Early History of Cottey College, 1884-1908."

104. Stockard, First 75, p. 10.

105. "Early History of Cottey College^ 1884-1908."

106. Sklar, Catharine Beecher, pp. 59-60.

107. Dorothy Scovil Vickery, Hollins College: 1842-1942, (Hollins College, Virginia: Hollins College, 1942), pp. 4, 22, 67.

108. Carrie Ann Reneau Dow, /^"Autobiography^, 11 January 1947, Percival DeLuce Memorial Collection, Northwest Missouri State Univer­ sity, Maryville, Missouri, pp. 66-68.

109. Campbell, Cottey, pp. 76-77.

110. Campbell, Cottey, pp. 76, 81, 100-104, 114, 126, 128, 174, 215, 225.

111. Joseph Deliver Ell i f f , "A Survey of Cottey College," (1928), pp. 15-30, CCA.

112. Ell i f f , "Survey," p. 22.

113. Ell iff, "Survey," p. 16.

114. Ell i f f , "Survey," p. 26.

115. Ell i f f , "Survey," pp. 15-28.

116. Stockard, First 75, p. 47.

117. Campbell, Cottey, pp. 79-80.

118. Stockard, First 75, p. 9. 95

119. E llif f , "Survey," pp. 7-14.

120. Watson, "That Rare," p. 17.

121. Evans, "Memories," p. 7.

122. Gray, oral history interview.

123. Gray, oral history interview.

124. Mamie Taylor, reminiscences, in Campbell, Cottey, p. 87.

125. Cottey College Chronicle, 1: 2, (December 1891); 10: 1, (December 1899); 12: 1, (November 1901), CCA.

126. Cottey College Chronicle, 3: 5, (February 1894); 3: 7, (April 1894), CCA.

127. Stockard, First 75, p. 22.

128. Cottey College Chronicle, 3: 7, (April 1894); 3: 5, (February 1894), CCA.

129. Cottey College Chronicle, /June 18927.

130. Katherine May Heaton, "Founder's Day, 100th Anniversary of V ir­ ginia Alice Cottey Stockard," K i - 0* Record, 60: 6, (June 1948), p. 8; Cottey College Chronicle, /June 189^/; Mountain Grove (Missouri) Journal, 25 June 1959; /Nevada (Missouri) Daily M ail/ C. 1961.

131. /^unknown newspapejr/, June 1973, "1959 Distinguished Alumnae Citation, Dr. Irma Highbaugh, '12" Cottey College Alumnae Office; "Biographical Sketch of Irma Highbaugh," "1959 Distinguished Alumnae Citation, Dr. Irma Highbaugh, '12," Cottey College Alumnae Office.

132. Cottey College Chronicle, 3: 9, (June 1894), /p. 27.

133. /Stockar^, "Story of Cottey College," p. 46.

134. George_A. Works and H. C. Gregg, "Report of a Survey of Cottey College," /193V, p. 1-14.

135. Mary R itter Beard, "The Direction of Women's Education," (1937), pp. 159-167 in Mary R itter Beard: A Sourcebook, Ed., Ann J. Lane (New York: Schocken Books, 1977).

136. Beard, "Direction."

137. Smith-Rosenberg, "Female World," p. 9. 96

138. Alice Duer M iller and Susan Myers, Barnard College: The First F ifty Years (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939), p. 121.

139. Laura I . Martin, "Ideals of P. E.0.," £. E. 0. Record, 66: 3.

140. Clapp, p. 238; £. E^. 0. Record, 38: 11, (November 1927), pp. 1, 9.

141. Virginia Alice Cottey Stockard, "Cottey College," IP.E. 0. Record, 42: 1, (January 1930), p. 9.

142. "Virginia Alice Cottey Stockard," P^. £. 0. Record, 52: 8, (August 1940), p. 3.

143. "Virginia Alice Cottey Stockard," p. 3.

144. Campbell, Cottey, p. 240.

145. "Illness of Mrs. Stockard," P. E. 0. Record, 47: 2, (February 1935), p. 12.

146. Louise M. Henely, "Report of Board of Trustees of Cottey College," 2- i - 2- Record, 51: 11, (November 1939), p. 26.

147. "Virginia Alice Cottey Stockard," £. £. 0. Record, 52: 8, (August 1940), p. 3. CHAPTER IV

THE FLOWERING OF WOMEN'S CULTURE AT COTTEY COLLEGE

Women's culture at Cottey College continued to flourish into the

1920s and 1930s. Thereafter, however, as memory of the nineteenth century roots of women's culture faded, women at Cottey gradually lost hold of those values which most distinguished them as women and con­ sequently the general culture of men's values came to dominate the college. At the same time that women were losing hold of their own culture, the dominant culture extended its nineteenth century penchant for control of the environment and, through various means, exerted in­ creasing control over women thereby making i t more d iffic u lt for women to express th eir own culture. The dominant culture began making in­ roads at Cottey prior to the First World War, which gradually increased with the coincident slackening of women's cultural strength in the 1940s and 1950s, and climaxed in 1965 with the hiring of a male president who governed male administrators and male-dominated faculty.

The college continued to serve only women students, however, and i t was through the students that elements of women's culture survived at

Cottey. Even the surviving elements of women's culture, however, bore marks of redefinition under pressure from men's culture.

Students and faculty members at Cottey created women's culture as

i t was known at the college. The following chapter describes students' 97 98 and faculty members' characteristics which created the social milieu in which women's culture existed. Characteristics of the students in­ clude the student body size, the racial identity of students and in particular the admission of international students and black students, the socio-economic background of students including parents' occupa­ tions and religion, and P. E. 0, connections of the students. The chapter then describes how students' vocational preferences reflect students' response to the dominant culture. Students' creation of women's culture at Cottey, on the other hand, reflects the sort of world they created for themselves in their relatively insular situa­ tion. Their culture is described in their traditions and the strongly bonded friendships which they formed and which affected th eir living associations in the residence halls and on campus.

Certain factors also affected faculty members and created the en­ vironment in which they participated in women's culture at Cottey.

This chapter describes faculty members' living arrangements, non­ teaching duties, professional consciousness and low salaries, factors which helped to determine that women who accepted a teaching assign­ ment at the college shared certain precepts and interests. The chapter then concludes with a description of women's culture as

faculty members expressed i t in monthly study meetings,which enabled

them to share intellectual and social interests, and in their com­

panionship, supportiveness and strongly bonded friendships. 99

Chapter V described the decline of women's culture at Cottey.

I t begins with biographical sketches of the four women who served as president of the college between 1929 and 1965--women who played sig­ nificant roles in women's culture and its decline at Cottey, The presidents served in the following order: Mary Rose Prosser, 1929-1933;

Florence E. Boehmer, 1933-1937; Marjorie M itchell, 1938-1949; and

Blanche Hinman Dow, 1949-1965. Dean Orpha Stockard, of no relation to the founder, served as acting president, 1937-1938. Because she served for such a short term and made no major changes in the college, her influence as president w ill not be treated in this study. Chapter

V concludes with a description of the decline of women's culture whereby the dominant culture of men's values came to exert controlling influence over the college.

In the fir s t th irty -fiv e years of P. E. 0. ownership of Cottey, the student body varied considerably in size but varied l i t t l e in com­ position. Until the end of the 1932-1933 academic year, the student population at Cottey included academy (high school) as well as college students. In the fir s t year of P. E. 0. operation and control, 198 students attended Cottey.^ How many of them were college students is unknown, but in the following year when total enrollment numbered 200,

82 students were in college. Enrollment declined from this peak until

1932-1933, the last year the academy operated, when 105 students at­ tended Cottey, only 59 of whom were in college. Most of the decline occurred in the academy ranks where enrollment dropped from 118 in

1930-1931 to 46 in 1932-1933, a 61 percent reduction. College 100 enrollment declined only 28 percent, from 82 to 59 during the same period. Enrollment declined again the following year, the fir s t year without the academy and the fir s t year of Boehmer's administration. In

1933-1934 the college's enrollment stood at 48. From this nadir,

Boehmer increased the student body to 70 in 1936-1937, the last year of her service. After P. E. 0. Hall opened in 1939 with accommodations for 100 students, Cottey's housing capacity, including rooms in Rose­ mary Hall, reached 142. In the fir s t two years of Mitchell's administration enrollment jumped from 92 to 136. Thereafter she achieved a steady increase to 156 in 1947-1948 and 150 in her final year. Mitchell stretched college facilities to the limit and exceeded o ffic ia l capacity for the last six years of her tenure.

Increasing numbers of high school students applied for admission to Cottey after the Second World War. This increasing demand for women's higher education eliminated any concern that the college be

fille d to capacity each year. By using some rooms in Main Hall,

Mitchell squeezed 156 students into the college in 1947-1948. Compe­

titio n for admission was keen, she admitted: "One aunt and uncle from

New Mexico brought their niece from Indiana and camped at the auto

court during the opening days, hoping that we should have a vacancy.

One prospective student eloped, and the camper got in. She's a de- 2 sirable student too!" Increased interest in women's education after

the Second World War contributed to M itchell's decision to build a new

residence h all. Reeves Hall opened in 1949 to house 100 additional

students. 101

The college's a b ility to attract students continued throughout

Dow's administration. Robertson Hall, which housed 150 students and the new college dining room, was bu ilt in 1959. Student rooms in

Rosemary Hall were converted to classrooms and housing capacity now stood at 348 in the three residence halls. In 1961, the peak year for enrollment since the college opened, Dow reported to her board "that the enrollment is now 364 in residence and that some rooms are being 3 used by three instead of two g irls." The following year, "Dr. Dow stated she fe lt sure Cottey's enrollment could reach five hundred students by 1967.

Dow made two significant changes in admission policy: (1) to admit

international students, and (2) to admit black students. Mitchell and her board had considered possible admission of international

students, and the fir s t international student to be admitted after

P. E. 0. assumed control of the college was Mary Campbell of British

Columbia who enrolled in the fa ll semester, 1945. The following year

Mitchell weighed factors involved in admitting other international

students.

1. How would we be able to select a g irl so that she would be happy in our group and able to do our college work?

2. What should we do with a homesick girl?

3. What should we do in case of illness? Who would pay the b ills in such an emergency?

4. What would we do with a young g irl during vacations?

5. What should we do about remission of fees for foreign students? 102

I am fully convinced that life at Cottey is an ex­ perience in democracy. Perhaps living two years with us would be worth a trip from a foreign land and so perhaps we should encourage such students to come. I really do not know the answer. . . . We shall, of course follow whatever policy you set up, but I should like you to discuss the matter fu lly and de­ termine that policy.

In response to Mitchell's request for a policy statement on the matter the board of trustees decided "that in view of the conditions at

Cottey i t is unwise at present to accept students from non-English speaking countries."^

So matters stood until Dow's fir s t meeting with the board upon assuming office when the policy was reversed stating "that the Board favor the admission of a limited number of foreign students."^ At the next board meeting in March, 1950, two scholarships for international students wre announced. One scholarship was contributed by a prominent g Nevada businessman, L. F. Richardson, to an Estonian student. The

Nevada Civic and Charitable Association granted $1000 "to bring to

Cottey for a year Illona Planken, a highly recommended Estonian g irl, forced to flee with her family from Estonia in 1944 when i t was annex­ ed by Russia, who had entered the United States under the 'Displaced

Persons Act.'"^

Only in 1955 did the executive board of Supreme Chapter ask the board of trustees "to require that all foreign students . . . take out medical and surgical health insurance. . . thus meeting one of the issues Mitchell had raised earlier. At their spring, 1956, meeting the trustees established the policy requiring all international students to purchase health insurance available through the Institute of 103

International Education.Other concerns previously expressed by

Mitchell regarding admission of international students seem not to have materialized as major problems, for the program continued after

Dow le ft the presidency.

Nine students from eight countries attended Cottey in 1950-1951.

They represented Canada, Mexico and Panama and war-scarred Latvia,

Estonia, France, Greece andHolland.The following year 14 students from eight foreign countries were on campus. International student enrollment never dropped below seven and generally remained between

12 to 16 for the remainder of Dow's term. As many as 14 countries were represented at any one time.

As early as her fir s t board meeting "Dow reported that there had

been inquiry concerning the admission of negro /T ic / students."

The board established no policy at that meeting for admission of

blacks. When eight years later a Nigerian woman applied for admission

on a scholarship, "the trustees agreed that the application be pro­

cessed as a ll foreign student applications are and, i f found to be an 13 outstanding and acceptable student to be admitted." The nature of

the general culture's racial concern is reflected in the board of

trustees' reaction to the Nigerian's application. Since 1953 Asian

students from India, Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan, Tibet,

Korea, the Philippines and China had attended Cottey. Clearly, at a

time when black c iv il rights were emerging as a national issue, i t was

the black color line which was at issue—whether the black was foreign

or American. The board declared a policy open to blacks, but for an 104 unspecified reason, the Nigerian did not complete the application pro­ cess.

I t was only in 1964 that the fir s t black students enrolled at

Cottey. Dow reported that Jo Ann White and Bonnie Blackman, both of

L ittle Rock, Arkansas, "are poised and serious of purpose and have been well received on campus, in church, at the Rotary Club, and in a ll their relationships within the community.Cottey had difficulty attracting black students, however, because both the enrollment and the town of Nevada were small and, except for the international stu­ dents, all white. The community's tradition stretched back to

Confederate sympathies which were kept alive by the annual Bushwhacker

Days celebration when a Confederate flag flew over the courthouse.

Although Dow reported a friendly reception for these fir s t blacks, clearly blacks could find l i t t l e in the community with which to iden­ tify .

From the earliest days, Cottey attracted students from many states, and the proportion coming from states outside Missouri in­ creased as the enrollment grew. Of the total academy and college

registration of 105 students in 1932-1933, 60 came from Missouri, 11 from Kansas, 10 from Nebraska, and the remaining 24 from nine other

states. In the last ten years of M itchell's term more than 20 states

consistently were represented on campus, and during Dow's administra­

tion as many as 36 states were represented. The large enrollment of

364 students in 1961-1962 came from 35 states with the largest num­

bers coming from Missouri (26 students), Kansas (33) and California 105

(29). At the same time, the 16 years of Dow's administration found anywhere from seven to 14 foreign countries represented on campus.

All of the presidents nurtured diversity within the student body i f only by variety of geographic origins. The college drew on the en­ tire nation for students. This tradition, begun by Stockard, was strengthened by P. E. 0. recruitment of students after 1929. Such geographic diversity among students tended to modify the homogenous racial and social natuare of the student body, but students nonetheless shared similar home environments. In describing the students Mitchell said, "Our entering g irl is lik e ly to be just seventeen; she is also likely to be young for that age since she generally comes from a home 15 where she has been much protected." In part because of this fact

Dow brought international students on campus. "Such a project," she believed, "would introduce American Cottey students to the customs and mores of these international students likewise giving them the bene­ f i t of a cosmopolitan atmosphere they might never have."^® In what amounted to a reverse missionary impulse, Dow suggested that "such a program would offer an opportunity for a junior college liberal arts education to /foreign/ girls who otherwise might not have the chance for any^ higher e d u c a tio n .W h e re a s Stockard had educated students to become foreign missionaries, Dow saw Cottey, in part, functioning as a mission school for the international students. The international student program also reversed the traditional missionary relationship by bringing foreign students on campus to educated American students on the ways of foreign cultures. 106

Diversity of geographic origin was an asset in the overall pro­ gram at Cottey. Many alumnae testified to its impact on their education at the college.

Cottey helped tear down any racial or national pre­ judice I might have had because such a mixture of the world's human components was found on her campus, and the total group was small enough for a ll girls to get to know and understand each other better.

At Cottey I learned to liv e with and to love people, not only of my,native state and country, but from other nations.

And an alumna who lived in Okinawa after leaving Cottey said.

I t was at Cottey that I fir s t learned the true meaning of tolerance. Living among students of other coun­ tries is a truly wonderful experience. One learns to accept their ways and respect them. That is a very valuable lesson when later one finds oneself living as a foreigner in another country.

Although Cottey students came from geographically diverse regions, they shared other aspects of their backgrounds. Most came from smal-1 communities. Throughout the entire period, 1929-1946, more than 50 percent of the students came from towns of less than 10,000, a pro- 20 portion which reflected national demographic distribution. Only after the Second World War did more than 20 percent of the entering students originate in cities larger than 100,000 population.

Occupations of students' parents reflect their middle class origins. I t is unfortunate that records of mothers' occupations were not coTlected for any period other than the 1931-1932 academic year.

In that year only 5 of 120 mothers worked outside the home, while

115 (92.50 percent) were identified as homemakers. At least for the

1931-1932 year, most students came from middle class homes with a 107 wage or salary earning father and a homemaker mother.

An overview of the entire period, 1931-1946, shows that most students were daughters of business- and clerical-employed fathers.

In the same 15-year period, the second most frequent category of fathers' occupations, however, shifted from agriculture, representing nearly one-fourth of the fathers, to skilled labor, which accounted for more than one-third of fathers' occupations, and then to the pro­ fessions.

Thus, throughout the period, most fathers were in business-related occupations; the number in the professions fluctuated but closed the period as the second most"frequent occupation; the number in agricul­ ture declined overall from the second to the third most frequent occupation; and the number in skilled labor declined from the third to the fourth most frequent occupation. A fifth occupational category, armed services, was added during the war years and was higher in fre ­ quency even than agriculture in 1942-1943. With the coming of the war the number of fathers in skilled labor occupations showed the

greatest decline of a ll. Thus Cottey students generally represented

diverse socio-economic backgrounds. 'While many came from white collar

homes, others came from blue collar homes.

Another important characteristic of students and their families is

their religious preference. Protestants clearly dominated the student

body. An untabulated order of preference for 1931-1932 shows religious

denominations listed in descending order: 108

Methodist Baptist Presbyterian Christian Christian Science Congregational

One or two students were listed for each of the following denomina­ tions:

Episcopal Catholic Evangelical United Brethren Lutheran Church of Christ

Except for the 1941-1942 academic year when Presbyterians out­ numbered other denominations, the Methodists represented the largest number of Cottey students throughout the period 1931-1946. In part this reflects Stockard's long-standing ties with Methodism and her re­ cruitment of students through Methodist ministers and congregations.

Many Methodists doubtless knew more about Cottey College than did other groups, and the tradition of sending Methodist daughters to Cottey car­ ried over long after Stockard's retirement.

Together the Methodists and Presbyterians clearly outnumbered other denominations. Representation of other religious groups fluctu­ ated widely, although Protestant denominations dominated. Catholics twice rose above five percent of the entering students and their

families, in 1937-1938 and 1941-1942, but generally there were only one or two Catholics among the entering students. Only one Jewish

student entered Cottey during the 1932-1946 years for which information

on religious preference is available. 109

Although Methodists outnumbered other denominations, students

represented a larger number of denominations as the period progressed.

The figure increased from nine denominations in 1932-1933 to 13 ten years la te r. The increased diversity in denominations resulted from

the sh ift in student recruitment from Stockard's appeal through Metho­

dist congregations to the Sisterhood's recruitment from a broader

population.

Increased numbers of families declared that they had no religious

a ffilia tio n or that they were undecided about i t . This designation

fir s t appeared in 1942-1943 when 2.9 percent declared they had no

religious a ffilia tio n . Although in 1943-1944 only 1.1 percent de­

clared they were undecided, 5.6 percent made this statement in 1945-

1946. The trend toward declaring no religious affiliation is coinci­

dent with the Second World War and reflects the shattering effect the

war had on established social standards.

Thus, Cottey students generally came from white, middle- or

working-class, Protestant families who lived in small towns or on

farms. Their socio-economic sim ila rity, however, was enlivened by the

geographical diversity of their origins. Students came to Cottey from

every region of the country and, by the 1950s, from several foreign

countries as w ell. Not a ll students came from comfortable, substantial

homes, however. Many students and their families—particularly their

mothers—made great sacrifices for their enrollment at Cottey. Dora

Kenady, the house director and d ie titia n on an eleven-month contract,

and Maude M ullikin, a registered nurse on a nine-month contract, each 1 1 0 received a maintenance allowance as part of their compensation. This allowance included their own board and room as well as board for each 21 of their dauthters who shared occupancy of their mothers' rooms. An even more unusual arrangement for a woman supporting her daughter at

Cottey was the case of I va O'Hair who worked for the college as a fie ld secretary in Indiana in return for her daughter's board and room at

Cottey. O'Hair's very evident enthusiasm for Cottey did not hide the paid of sacrifice for her daughter. In a le tte r to the college, she said--

Genevieve wishes to continue her study of piano and to take the regular Freshman course in the college, i f that is possible. Her tuition then, I believe, would be $270.00. I shall be prepared to pay that unless the sky fa lls , which I have faith enough to believe i t w ill not. To that amount I can add $100--making the total $370. (Again unless something happens I do not look fo r.) The remaining $300 I should pay by continu­ ing the work I am now doing. I know the discount this year was for $400—but I am an optimist and I believe things are going to be better next year--and although I shall not diminish my work for Cottey nor my enthusiasm nor the time and energy I spend on the enterprise, I really want to pay more i f I can. I f I could pay all the tuition I would s t ill work for Cottey next year-- and I hope the next while Genevieve is there. I t is the pledge I made myself after I came away last fa ll and considered the fine things you and Dr. Prosser have done for me.

Connections of students with the P. E. 0. Sisterhood reflect in­ direct P. E. 0. influence on Cottey women's culture. Certainly

P. E. O.'s hoped that students whom they sent to Cottey would reflect the Sisterhood's values. Five categories illu s tra te the various rela­ tionships of P. E. O.'s with Cottey students: (1) students who were

P. E. O .'s, (2) students whose mothers were P. E. O .'s, (3) students I l l who had other relatives who were P. E. O .'s, (4) students who held

P. E. 0. loans, and (5) students who held P. E. 0. scholarships. The categories are not mutually exclusive. Conceivably a student could be counted in all of the five categories, or at least more than one.

The P. E. 0. connection early became a vital source of support for

Cottey. Probably the best indicator of their support is the number of students whose mothers belonged to the Sisterhood. All of the college's presidents appealed for P. E. 0. daughters to be enrolled in the college. In the second year that the Sisterhood administered

Cottey, already 12 percent of the students were P. E. 0. daughters.

Boehmer increased this figure to 50 percent by the end of her term in

1936-1937. During Mitchell's presidency the number of P. E. 0. daugh­ ters dropped below 50 percent, to 49 and 46 percent in her last two years. She reached a peak with 60 percent of the student body P. E. 0. daughters in 1939-1940 and 61 percent in 1940-1941.

The number of students who were members of the Sisterhood fluctu­

ated from three percent in 1937-1938 to 15 percent in 1949-1950. No

pattern is evident in the 10 years from 1930-1940. Often P. E. O.'s

encouraged their daughters to accept invitations into the Sisterhood.

Hence the number of students who were P. E. O.'s is lik ely included in

the figures showing the number of students whose mothers were P. E.

O.'s. Not only women who were P. E. O.'s and daughters of P. E. O.'s

attended Cottey, but a sizeable number of students had other P. E. 0.

relatives as well. In 1934-1935, 22 percent of the students had other

relatives who were members of the Sisterhood. This proportion dropped 1 1 2 to a low of 6 percent in 1941-1942 and rose again to 42 percent in

1949-1950.

Another important measure of P. E. 0. support of Cottey is the number of scholarships given to students by the Sisterhood. In

1934-1935 P. E. 0. gave 10 scholarships which represented 20 percent of the student body. This form of support reached its maximum level with 36 percent, 47 percent and 41 percent of the students receiving

P. E. 0. scholarships in 1936-1937, 1937-1938 and 1938-1939 respective­ ly. Although the total number of scholarships declined slightly in the early 1940s, the proportion of students holding scholarships never fe ll below 24 percent and by 1949-1950 i t rose to 32 percent.

Especially in the 1930s, students drew on the P, E. 0. Educational

Fund for loans. In 1930-1931, eight students, four percent of the student body, held loans. This figure rose to 16 students, 23 per­

cent of the student body, in 1936-1937 and did not fa ll below the o ri­ ginal four percent until 1943-1944 when only one student held a

P. E. 0. loan.

P. E. 0. subsidization of Cottey through financial aid to students

reached significant proportions within ten years after the Sisterhood

assumed administration of the college. Without detailed records one

cannot be sure that there was no overlap in the categories of students

receiving P. E. 0. loans and those receiving scholarships, but it is

likely that the P. E. O.'s awarded only one form of financial aid to an

individual student. Upon this assumption it appears that the Sister­

hood subsidized up to 59 percent of the student body in 1936-1937 and 113 up to 60 percent in 1937-1938. The proportion of students subsidized fe ll in the 1940s but once again reached 38 percent in 1949-1950.

Unfortunately the financial records for the 15 years from 1950 to 1965 are unavailable, but P. E. 0. commitment to Cottey students in the first 20 years of the Sisterhood's administration is clear, and minutes of a faculty committee in the period following Dow's administration

indicate that the Sisterhood's sponsorship of students through scholar- 23 ships and loans continued to increase.

The women's culture in which Cottey students participated in part reflected influences from outside the college and in part represented

the students' own creation. Outside influences are found in the voca­

tional preferences declared by students entering Cottey. A summary of

entering students' vocational preferences expressed their perceptions of the possible occupations and roles available to them and thus the

social parameters within which they would make lif e choices.

The discussion of students' vocational interests is based on

college records for 1931-1932, 1938-1943 and 1944-1946. The o ffic ia l

records include no definitions of the terms used in the annual surveys

summarized here. Meaning for most of the terms is self-evident, but

some categories such as a rt, business, language or music are too

vague to convey the exact nature of students' interests.

The vocational category showing the largest change in students'

preference in the 15 years from 1931 to 1946 is education. In 1931-

1932, nearly two-thirds of the entering students chose education as 114 their vocational interest, but by 1945-1946 less than 10 percent chose this fie ld . Education is the only fie ld listed which showed a straightline development. Declining interest of students in education resulted from the broadening number of occupational fields which the students considered were available to them and by Cottey's elimination of a teachers' certificate program in 1936.

As interest in education as a vocational preference declined, social work increased in interest, although i t by no means reached the same level of popularity that education once held. By 1945-1946, how­ ever, social work joined journalism as a vocational interest of 8.9 percent of entering students. Almost every year of the 15 years stud­

ied, journalism attracted five percent or more of the students.

The Second World War brought significant changes in attitudes of entering students at Cottey as reflected in their vocational interests.

Home economics enjoyed a sudden surge of pre-war popularity, moving

from the choice of only 2.7 percent of entering students in 1938-1939

to the peak of 19.2 percent in 1940-1941. Interest in home economics

declined slightly throughout the early war years but took a sudden

drop in 1944-1945 when only 5.3 percent of entering students chose

home economics as the fie ld of their vocational interest. In 1945-1946

i t was chosen by only 6.7 percent of the entering students. New pos­

sibilities appeared more attractive to the students. By the early

and mid-1940s, students declared for aviation, the diplomatic service,

laboratory technology, law, occupational therapy, personnel work and

radio. None of these fields had been selected by students in 115

1931-1932.

More than 17 percent of the students chose secretarial work as their vocational interest in the five years from 1938 to 1943. In

1941-1942, wartime demands for clerical workers brought 24.7 percent of entering students in to the secretarial fie ld . Interest in secre­ ta ria l work as a vocation waned toward the end of the war, however, and dropped to 15.2 percent in 1944-1945 and 11.2 percent in 1945-1956.

This category remained higher in vocational interest among entering

students than any other category in the war years and immediate post­ war years with the exception of the "undecided" category which w ill be

discussed later. Interest in secretarial work as a vocation also was

reflected in firs t semester secretarial studies enrollment, which

climbed from 57 students in 1940-1941 to 60 students the following year and peaked at 109 students in 1943-1944. Only 67 students en- ?4 rolled in secretarial courses in 1944-1945. Mitchell attributed

shifts in curriculum enrollment, particularly in secretarial studies,

to the war situation. Once the decline in secretarial studies enrol­

lment was evident, Mitchell noted, "The greatest sh ift is away from

secretarial studies. The rush for Civil Service jobs must have died

down."^^

Other vocational categories showing interest by more than five

percent of Cottey's entering students in 1938-1946 were nursing, social

work and journalism. Interest in nursing peaked at 10.3 percent of

entering students in 1941-1942 but then dropped to 5.7 percent the fo l­

lowing year and was only 3.3 percent in 1945-1946. Social work was a 116 field of low interest during the war years, never rising above 2.1 per­ cent declared interest by entering stidents. In the immediate post-war years, however, social work climbed to 6.2 percent in 1944-1945 and

8.9 percent interest among entering students in 1945-1946. Journalism fluctuated broadly as a fie ld of vocational interest during these years. Generally during the war more than five percent of entering students declared for journalism except for 1941-1942 when no one chose this fie ld as their career choice. In 1944-1945, however, 4.5 percent of entering students selected journalism as th eir vocational interest and in 1945-1946, 8.9 percent declared for journalism. Journalism en­ abled Cottey women to apply their humanities-oriented liberal arts program in a practical line of work to which the war-time reporting of Marguerite Higgins and other women doubtless contributed the added appeal of adventure.

Women's roles in wartime heavy industries are not apparent in vocational interests declared by Cottey's entering students during the war years. The most obvious association of students' chosen vo­ cations with the war emergency is the aviation category, which was chosen as a vocational fie ld by 1.0 percent of entering students in

1942-1943, by 1.8 percent in 1944-1945 and by 1.1 percent in 1945-1946.

At least one Cottey student, Dora Dougherty who entered Cottey in the fall of 1939, made aviation her life's work upon graduation. After graduating from Cottey, Dougherty transferred to Northwestern Univer­ sity, but interrupted her college studies the following year to enlist

in the Army Air Corps flig h t training program. She was commissioned 117 as a Women's Airforce Service P ilot (WASP) and for the next two years,

1942-1944, "served as a ferry p ilo t, target p ilo t, personnel and cargo transport pilot, radio control pilot and crew standardization in­ structor pilot. . flying "most of the attack bombers, dive bombers, nr heavy bombers and cargo planes in use by the Army during that period."

Dougherty continued her career in aviation after the war, earning the fir s t Ph.D. degree in avaiation education to be awarded by New York

University in June 1955, and earning the Airline Transport Piloting

Rating which "would enable her to fly a commercial plane, were women eligible."^^

Aviation and secretarial work were the vocational areas chosen by Cottey's entering students which directly related to the war effort.

Whether other students intended to join Rosie the Riveter is not evi­ dent from the information available. Those who entered war industries work probably considered the work a temporary expedient during the war emergency after which they would find employment more closely related to their college education.

For the most part, these 17- and 18-year old Cottey women in the depression and war years anticipated entering vocations considered tra ­ ditional for women. Only a few women chose trad itio n ally non-female vocations such as aviation, engineering, law, medicine or radio.

Longitudinal information is not available to indicate the vocations these women eventually entered. Information on their vocational in­ terests which is reported here, however, reflects the world view which these women held. Their world view was bounded by the walls of 118 traditional roles, but these roles broadened considerably in the 15 years from 1931 to 1946. In 1931-1932, 64.2 percent of Cottey's en­ tering students declared a vocational interest in education, and in

1945-1946 only 8.9 percent chose education. The number of students w illing to consider other vocational fields had expended from 35.8 percent to 91.1 percent.

Increasing numbers of students, however, found no vocational fie ld of interest to them. In the earliest year of our information,

1931-1932, only 12.5 percent of the entering students made no voca­ tional choice. In the last years of the depression, however, the percentage of vocationally disaffected students rose to 28.3 percent

in 1940-1941, and only on the eve of U. S. entry into the war, in

1941-1942, did this figure relapse to the relatively low point of

15.5 percent of the entering students. In the following year the fig ­

ure rose again to 22.0 percent and i t continued to rise to 43.7

percent in 1945-1946.

The Second World War profoundly affected the young women entering

Cottey. With the tremendous uncertainties brought about by the war,

these women, whose brothers, fathers and male high school friends went

to fight great battles, found themselves removed from the war effo rt.

Even work in the college's Red Cross room rolling bandages and the re­

strictions of food rationing kept the war at arm's length from the

young women. Their parents could afford to send them to this private

college in a small Missouri town and, as a consequence, the students

were cushioned from the war's impact. Increasingly they admitted that 119 they could not decide on a vocation. At a time when a war crisis threatened the country, at a time when economic adjustments brought increasing numbers of women into occupations where few women pre­ viously were employed, 43.7 percent of Cottey's entering students were confused as to what active role they might play in the economy. This figure does not represent their actual roles once leaving college, but

it indicates that the young women entering Cottey, as never before, were at a loss to know how they personally could f i t into the dominant culture. Although they faced uncertainty in the larger world,, at

Cottey students found on campus a warm, supportive women’s culture which sustained them.

Women's culture at Cottey was primarily a creation of the women

on campus, notwithstanding external influences. Students created women's culture through their traditions and living associations in the

residence halls. Higher educational institutions often are noted for

their special trad itio ns--rituals which focus on commencement, on

sports, or on other events of local significance. At Cottey College,

traditions emerged through the years, based on early practices during

Stockard's administration and modified as the needs of students changed

over time. All of the traditions at Cottey focus on the relationship

between fir s t and second year students and thus offer insights into

women's culture at the college. The earliest tradition originated in

the Christmas celebration which gradually shifted from a faculty gift

to students to a g ift from second-year students to first-year students.

The big sister program originated as a means to prevent homesickness 1 2 0

in the opening days of the fa ll term, and developed into an elaborate

structure whereby students expressed loving friendship for each other

thorugh the capping ceremony, serenades, and "pass downs".

The oldest tradition at Cottey originated with the early Christ­ mas celebrations. Like some other colleges, Stockard allowed no winter vacation other than Christmas Day because she thought a longer 28 recess from classes would disrupt the students' academic work. She

took care, however, to plan a fu ll day of celebration to preclude

homesick moments for her students. The holiday began at four o'clock

in the morning when Stockard and the faculty arose to decorate a

Christmas tree and arrange gifts for students around i t . Then she and

the faculty walked through the halls ringing sleigh bells and singing

carols. After breakfast and religious services at church the students 29 were surprosed with the tree and gifts.

The practice of celebrating Christmas in this manner continued

through the years. In the early 1930s i t was modified by Myrtle Le-

Compte, Dean of Students, into a program conducted by students in

formal dress. The program began with soft violin music followed by

students describing Christmas customs and legends in other countries

and reading the biblical Christmas story. Then, "the fireplace was l i t

symbolizing the heart of lif e at Cottey just as many years ago i t was

regarded as the center of home life*," boughs of greens were hung in

each parlor window, and the ceremony ended with the group singing on "Silent Night." As in previous years students enjoyed a surprise

Christmas tree the morning after Hanging of the Greens, but by the 1 2 1

late 1930s i t was a surprise prepared by second year students for fir s t 31 year students. Instead of celebrating Christmas Day, the Hanging

of the Greens started the Christmas season early in December. By 1945

holiday activities in itiated by the Greens ceremony extended through much of December and included the fir s t formal dance of the year, a

special Christmas dinner followed with a candle-light service by the

glee club, suite parties and g ift exchanges. "The climax of the holi­

day ac tivities was the midnight serenade of Christmas carols given 32 by the Seniors to the Juniors." Throughout the next th irty -fiv e years the Christmas traditions were modified only by becoming less

formal and by hanging Christmas greens in a ll of the expanding number

of college buildings.

The important development to note in the Cottey Christmas cele­

bration is the shift from a faculty sponsored affair to a ritual gift

by the second year class to the fir s t year class of the surprise

Christmas tree and later the midnight serenade. Other events also came

to have special significance in the relationship between classes and

between members of the classes and helped to perpetuate women's culture

at Cottey.

Under the big sister program, the Dean of Students appointed a

second year student to care for a f ir s t year student's needs, to help

prevent or cure homesickness, and to introduce her to college ways.

During the opening days of the term in September, various occasions

were set aside in the schedule for big sisters to take their l i t t l e 1 2 2 33 sisters downtown for a trea t, and at the spring commencement a cere­ mony of gowning or capping the second year students had emotional significance for big and l i t t l e sisters who thereby ended th eir college days together. The ceremony usually took place at tw ilight on the lawn in front of Main Hall. As described by Boehmer—

From one side of the campus came the Juniors, each girl carrying the cap and gown of her senior "big sister". From the other side of the campus the Seniors advanced to meet the Junior line. Under an arch of flowers each Junior helped her big sister put on for the fir s t time for formal wear her cap and gown and gave her a mar­ guerite, the Cottey flower. The whole effect was beautiful and dignified and gave to the later wearing of the caps and gowns by the Seniors a rich significance.

In the months between opening exercises and commencement, students found many occasions to exchange gestures and tokens of friendship.

Even in years after the administration no longer o ffic ia lly appointed big sisters, students in the two classes selected each other for spe­ cial attention. These relationships, although established by the students without administrative involvement, included a ll students on campus. Beyond the individual expressions of friendship, students' re­

lationships with each other found expression in gestures by one class for the other. Such class ac tivities included serenades in which the

second year students gathered outside the residence hall late at night

and surprised the fir s t year students with specially composed lyrics

set to fam iliar melodies. A week or two la te r the f ir s t year class

often returned the serenade with their own specially written lyrics.

At some time in Cottey history students began the practice of

"passing down" to their little sisters and other special friends in the 123 fir s t year class certain special figurines and other small tokens.

The "pass downs" were objects which never le ft campus but were handed from generation to generation of Cottey students thereby bonding a friendship between two students and perpetuating a loving sisterhood of a ll who had once possessed and then passed down the objects.

In their relationships with each other, expressed through indivi­ dual and class gestures and many other traditions too numerous to mention here, Cottey students institutionalized "smashing", a nine­ teenth-century term for students wooing each other with flowers, candy,

OC sentimental notes and other expressions of affection. For many students the bonds of sisterhood woven through shared experiences of just one academic year continued long after they le ft Cottey.

Founder's Day, the annual reunion held to commemorate Stockard's birth­ day, came to hold special significance as a time for alumnae to escape from ordinary lives back to their days of young womanhood. Rather than the gusto and football bravado so common at coeducational college homecomings. Founder's Day at Cottey was a time of renewal--a renewal of women's bonds of sisterhood in an environment of warm acceptance.

Student government as well as traditions structured women's cul­ ture at Cottey. With encouragement from Boehmer and other presidents,

Cottey students developed a functioning student government which help­ ed establish and enforce rules for the residence halls and social ac tivities . I t was the student council which discussed dress code re­ quirements that hats and hosiery be included in students' apparel 36 whenever they le ft campus. And, to promote living harmony in the 124 residence halls, i t was the student council which issued a new regula­ tion in 1938-1939 stating--

There is to be no sleeping together; however in the case of a double room i f one person is gone and an­ other person wishes to occupy that g irl's bed, she may do so i f she has obtained permission from the owner ofothe bed and from the chairman of the House Council.

The exchange of sleeping accommodations has continued to the present

time, but the last attempt at o ffic ia l regulation of the practice appeared in the 1959-1960 Student Handbook which advised, " If you

OO wish to sleep in another student's room consult your Dorm Counselor."

The primary concern of these regulations was to promote harmonious

living in the suites.

To assure proper respect for Cottey students by the men they

dated, the student council maintained a black lis t on which they placed

men for such social infractions as appearing intoxicated at a Cottey

dance. The only way a man could remove his name from the lis t was to 39 convince the college president of his worthiness.

The women's culture of students at Cottey College nurtured warm

friendships supportive of the students' growing sense of individual

autonomy. Women's culture enjoyed by faculty members, however, had a

different focus. The following section describes the professional

status of faculty at Cottey--their teaching and non-teaching assign-

ments--and then discusses women's culture from the faculty's

perspective. 125

Stockard and Prosser accomplished a smooth and uneventful transi­ tion of administration. At her fir s t faculty meeting, September 11,

1929,

Dr. Prosser welcomed the faculty and asked for co­ operation and loyalty in the coming year.

Mrs. Stockard closed the meeting with an appreciation for the help of the faculty in the past and a plea for support and loyalty to her successor.

The diversity of the faculty's academic assignments combined with Prosser's non-academic expectations of the faculty weakened the

faculty's professional focus. Until 1932-1933 the faculty consisted

of both academy and college teachers, but there was no sharp line

separating the two categories. Of the 21 faculty members in 1930-1931,

only 10 were assigned wholly either to the academy or to the college.

The remaining 11 faculty members divided their teaching between the 41 two branches of the institution. Comprehensive—and required--in-

volvement of faculty in all aspects of college activities followed

the pattern established by Stockard. Faculty continued to live in

student suites and to supervise a ll student ac tiv itie s . Responsibi­

lity for student life severely restricted personal activities of

faculty members. In October, 1930, Prosser issued regulations for

faculty weekend leave which divided the faculty into two groups.

Those in Group I were scheduled for six days of s ta ff assignment per

week. They could have one three-day or two two-day weekend leaves

each semester. Faculty listed in Group I I were assigned five-day

schedules and were permitted two-day weekend leaves provided the

leaves were arranged at least one week in advance. In a ll events. 126 faculty in both groups had to arrange leaves with the Dean of the

Faculty and had to assure proper arrangements during th eir absence 42 for the suite in which they lived.

Prosser tended, at times, to issue tedious instructions for faculty non-academic responsibilities. At the faculty meeting of

October 2, 1929,

Dr. Prosser asked the faculty to help her in teaching ideals to the g irls . The hostesses in the dining room were urged to follow the directions given them and to especially watch and correct bad table manners, such as misuse of silver, incorrect folding of the napkin. Those in charge of the suites were asked to call the girls together and talk to them about keeping down noise especially running and screaming in the halls.^j

Four months la te r, she "asked for cooperation from the hostesses in the diningroom to see that all joined heartily in singing and did not eat or talk while the music was going on."^^ At the same time that she placed social supervisory expectations on the faculty, Prosser also encouraged consciousness of professional status. Evidently i t was a new awareness for some i f a faculty debate on academic regalia is any indication. Four consecutive faculty meetings were necessary for the faculty to decide whether to wear regalia at commencement.^^

Prosser encouraged faculty professional development in more sub­ stantial ways than wearing academic regalia, however. Membership in professional organizations was one area which she chose to emphasize.

In October, 1930, "Dean Beck announced that a ll faculty members must become members of the Missouri Teachers Association," which carried dues of two dollars annually.^® The faculty duly complied and the 127 following week Beck announced the hardly surprising news that "Mr. E.

M. Carter, secretary of the Missouri Teachers' Association, had called

Cottey College by telephone, congratulating the faculty on one-hundred percent membership in the Missouri Association."^^ MIA members con­ tinued as a requirement of faculty members throughout Prosser's administration.

As a professional organization, MIA was of little use to college teachers. Prosser was concerned, however, not only with her college faculty, but with her academy faculty as well. By requiring all teachers to join MIA she assured that they all would receive some expo­ sure to new developments in the fie ld of education. She also could assure that all of her faculty would attend the association's annual state conference. As an in itia l effort to encourage professional memberships, her policy was reasonable.

Prosser also encouraged but did not require membership in the

American Association of University Women. The AAUW branch occasion­ ally met at the college, and faculty members participated in area 48 meetings held in neighboring towns. The AAUW president for the local nn branch was a member of the faculty.

Boehmer also strongly encouraged the faculty's professional de­ velopment. Whereas Prosser insisted on one hundred percent faculty membership in the Missouri State Teachers Association, Boehmer re­ placed compulsory professional membership with o ffic ia l encouragement backed by a faculty travel fund. In 1935, the board of trustees 128 approved Boehmer's recommendation to eliminate from faculty contracts the requirement of membership in professional organizations and atten­ dance at meetings. Instead, she set aside $200 in the budget to aid

faculty members who attended national conventions. "This fund," she

stipulated, "is in addition to the fund set aside for travelling ex- 50 penses of the Dean of the College." She also encouraged professional

development through graduate study, a policy in itiated by Prosser.

Whereas in May, 1933, there were no Ph.D.'s on the faculty, by October,

1935, three faculty members (in addition to Boehmer) held Ph.D.'s out

of a total faculty of 17. All other faculty held master's degrees.

Throughout Prosser's tenure at Cottey, she held weekly faculty

meetings each Wednesday at seven-thirty in the morning, a schedule in

its e lf which encouraged scholarly asceticism among even the least 52 professionally committed members. Boehmer continued the frequency

of meetings but abandoned the early morning hour. Primarily, these

meetings provided direct administrative contact with all faculty. In

addition, evening study meetings on a monthly basis enabled faculty to

report on special topics. In her fir s t semester at Cottey, Prosser

announced, "The topics for study shall follow the general subject of

the adjustment of college students, the nature of guidance and the

need of guidance. All of these discussions shall look forward to an 53 orientation week to be held next fa ll."

Faculty presented a wide variety of papers at their monthly meet­

ings—papers designed to inform faculty of developments in specific

disciplines as well as in higher education in general. January 29, 129

1930, "Miss Gal breath read a most interesting paper on 'The New

History', showing the trend of the study of history to be based on social and economic conditions rather than the work of generals and 54 armies." Other topics included Personal Qualifications for College

Teachers in the North Central Association, New England College Board

Examinations, European Honors, American Honors, Standardization of 55 Music Teaching, and Testing Progrsm. Study programs in 1932-1933 focused on aesthetic values--appreciation of musical forms and of dramatic forms, the lure of antiquity, and Ita lia n churches.

Monthly study meetings were one step toward faculty development.

Another was Prosser's expectations that a ll faculty members "do some sort of summer work--teaching, summer school, or correspondence 57 work." She intended that a ll faculty would hold a master's degree in their teaching fie ld . By 1931-1932 a ll faculty met this requirement except for those teaching voice and public school music, a rt, violin and theory, physical education and the assistant in piano and organ.

The following year these deficiencies were removed or were in the pro­ cess of being removed.^®

Low faculty salaries thwarted Prosser's efforts to build a

stronger academic program at Cottey. The issues of salaries also con­

tributed to a strong cohesive s p irit among faculty members. At the

beginning of her second year on campus, Prosser recommended a $9200

overall budgetary increase for faculty salaries in the 1930-1931

year.The average Cottey faculty salary was $1552.50 for the 1930-

1931 academic year, a figure which Prosser thought compared poorly 130 with the $2050 average paid at 17 junior colleges, accredited by the

North Central Association, in the pre-depression year, 1926-1927.^^

The depression which had begun in late 1929, had not yet affected

Cottey's salary scale, and Prosser reported the comparative salary in­ formation to Zora Y. Knight, Supreme President, emphasizing that Cottey salaries were about one-quarter lower than those of accredited junior colleges and urging an increase.

Prosser's effort to increase faculty salaries, however, faced the depression and declining enrollments which brought concomitant decline in tuition income. By late 1931 the college was in crisis. The

Supreme Board, meeting at Kansas City, December 4, 1931, informed

Prosser of retrenchment decisions i t had made. The nine items on the lis t of decisions held two stunning blows for Prosser--a general, across-the-boards salary cut of ten percent beginning January 1, 1932 and the decision not to apply to NCA for accreditation during the current year.^^ The decisions were equally stunning to the faculty although the exact nature of faculty response cannot be documented.

Minutes of a special faculty meeting on December 11, 1931 are not included in the faculty minute book, and without these minutes we can­ not know what action the faculty took. I t is reasonable to conclude, however, that faculty objected to the ten percent cut on salaries that already were considered low in the profession. Prosser's notes indi­ cate that she called the Supreme President Zora Y. Knight on December

11 and invited her to Cottey for a conference with her on the faculty's

CO action taken at the special meeting. Knight arrived on campus the 131 following day and, in response to faculty action, authorized applica­ tion to North Central for accreditation. Knight's action indicates that faculty tied th eir opposition to salary cuts to the Supreme

Board's decision not to seek accreditation. In the Board's perspec­ tiv e , doubtless i t seemed imprudent to apply for accreditation during a period of emergency retrenchment. I t is feasible that in faculty perspective, on the other hand, postponing accreditation would block recruitment of students, would undermine efforts to build enrollment and income from tu itio n , and would, in effect, accelerate the down­ ward spiral Cottey was in. The faculty apparently would accept a salary cut or no accreditation application, but they would not accept both. The faculty's determination in this matter is reflected in the results they achieved: the college's president contacted the Supreme

President immediately, the Supreme President arrived on campus the next morning and stayed for two days, and the Supreme President rever­ sed a policy decision made by the Supreme Board only eight days earlier.

Beyond their academic and non-academic assignments, their mem­ bership in professional organizations, their progress toward graduate degrees, and issues such as salary increases, faculty members at Cottey closely shared a women's culture which they created. Faculty members lived, worked and studied together, and also tended to socialize al­ most exclusively among themselves. As educated women in a small, rural Missouri town, their interests clearly overlapped more with other faculty at the college than with most local residents. As strangers who moved into the community only for the purpose of teaching at 132

Cottey, they had no social contacts in town. Their assignment to rooms in student suites eliminated a potential point of contact with the community, and only faculty who originated from Nevada seemed to have local acquaintances. Most other faculty had l i t t l e reason or op­ portunity for meeting Nevadans outside church attendance and occasional visits to local stores.

The monthly faculty study programs provided a diversion from the routine. At the October, 1932, session Opal Moore of the music faculty provided a mi ni-course in music appreciation. The faculty met at 1:30 on a Sunday afternoon in preparation for the radio broadcast of a New

York Philharmonic Orchestra concern conducted by Toscanini. But fir s t,

Moore described Toscanini's character and temperment, gave a short explanation of orchestral arrangements and instruments, and played a record showing tones of various instruments. At two o'clock they all gathered near her radio to hear the concert of Beethoven, Mendelssohn,

Busoni and Strauss.

I t was the faculty who provided the companionship, professional and social standards as well as supportiveness in the face of adversity for the 15 or 16 faculty women who shared most aspects of their lives.

Faculty reaction to the death of Mina Jargo, a secretarial studies teacher, on September 20, 1931, reveals the strength of faculty bonds.

A streptococcic infection which Jargo noticed in her foot one Monday worsened noticeably causing her to miss Thursday and Friday classes and to enter the local hospital on Saturday.^^ Her death Sunday morn­ ing, just a week after her thirty-fourth birthday, stunned the faculty. 133

Although Jargo was reared in Nevada and her parents s t ill lived on a farm west of town, the Cottey faculty took prominent part in her funeral services. A called faculty meeting on Tuesday arranged for the funeral. At the family's request, six faculty members served as pall­ bearers. The remainder of the faculty and staff acted as honorary pallbearers and lined the way from church to street to make way for those bearing the casket. The day after the funeral, another called faculty meeting appointed a committee to "draw up a resolution of love and appreciation of Miss Jargo, these resolutions to be sent to the family of the deceased.The resolution adopted read.

That in her death we have lost a dearly beloved friend and companion whose outstanding service we shall a l­ ways remember and whosgyunselfish lif e was an inspiration to us all.

Jargo, a Cottey graduate in the Class of 1916, taught at the col­

lege after completing a course at the Nevada Business College in 1917.

Clearly she belonged to Cottey. But even more, she belonged to the

faculty, a community of women, educated beyond the level of most Ameri­

can women, living in relative isolation, and sharing the responsibility

and the work of educating young women. They shared an encompassing

lif e style and they shared the idealism and dreams of educators. As a

women's community whose organized existence was solely to educate

women, i t was the faculty even more than the administration or the

P. E. 0. Sisterhood who through individual and group e ffo rt determined

the nature of the educational experience at Cottey. The women of the

faculty composed the core of a female academic environment which was

relatively immune to external influences. 134

Faculty lif e at Cottey was quieter than that of the students but not without its annoyances. At a faculty meeting in 1936 the women were told, "due to the living conditions of the faculty in the main buildings, that radios and extra noises from the faculty made it dif- 68 fic u lt for the students to study." Faculty no longer roomed with go students since Rosemary Hall opened in 1903. Rosemary, the second building on campus after old Main H all, housed the auditorium on the main floor, and student rooms on the second and third floors. The student rooms in Rosemary in itiated the suite plan of living at Cottey.

Suites consisted of single and double bedrooms surrounding a common living room. Each suite housed eight to ten students and one super­ vising faculty member who occupied a single room. The complete sep­ aration of faculty and student housing came only in 1939 when P. E. 0.

Hall opened to house 100 students. Again, student rooms conformed to the suite plan, but one Director of Residence was assigned for the entire hall rather than housing a faculty member in each suite.

Faculty who did not live in suites lived in Missouri H all, an old three-story red brick house across the street from Main Hall. When

Missouri Hall burned in December, 1940, faculty moved to E llis House, another large, red brock Victorian house located two blocks east of campus. Faculty continued to live together at E llis House until 1952 when i t was converted to house an overflow enrollment of students, and faculty found housing in the town.^^

Thus, for the fir s t 68 years of Cottey's history, most faculty trad itio nally shared living space in campus housing. Less historical 135 evidence is available for faculty relationships than for students', but i t is evident nonetheless that some faculty members shared friendships extending over decades.

Orpha Stockard joined Cottey's English faculty in 1933 and Floella

Farley joined the music faculty in 1934. Through the years, Farley and

Stockard emerged as a couple. In the summer of 1935 Farley took post­ graduate courses at the University of Missouri while Stockard completed her doctorate there. The following summer they both studied at Colum­ bia University in New York City and in the summer of 1939 at Cambridge

University. After the founder's death in 1940 her home, known as

Stockard House, was converted into two apartments for the president and the dean of faculty. Farley moved with Orpha Stockard, who had

been dean since 1936, into the dean's apartment. Farley and Stockard

continued sharing living accommodations throughout th eir remaining years on the s ta ff and after they retired in 1962 and 1965 respec­

tively.^^

Mauri ne Carroll and Carin Degermark also shared a close friend­

ship through the years. Carroll joined Cottey in 1939 as Director of

Residence and D ietitian. Degermark joined as Assistant to the Dean and

Instructor in Health Education in 1940. Both came from positions at

Medford (Oregon) Senior High School where Carroll had worked from 1922

to 1937 and Degermark had worked from 1930 to 1939. They le f t Cottey

together in 1954 to return to Oregon and open a children's clothing 72 store. 136

The women's culture at Cottey was similar to that at other women's institutions. A study of Wellesley College faculty in the period, 1880 to 1920, reflects many of the same characteristics.

Wellesley, like Cottey, "was committed to a totally female professor- 73 iate and president." Wellesley faculty women shared a female peer culture characterized by intimate sororial ties--a culture in which women "encouraged and took pleasure in each other'ssuccesses.For faculty and students, Cottey offered an insular environment where women's culture flourished. For decades this women's world provided professional careers for faculty and academic training for students, and i t provided a safe haven where women could shape their institution and their lives to meet their needs. Cottey was remarkably free from cut-throat competition, exploitation and power struggles which so commonly characterized men's culture in this same period. The next chapter w ill describe how men's culture gradually subverted women's culture at Cottey. NOTES FOR CHAPTER IV

1. Data used in this chapter were taken from a variety of sources. See especially: Reports of the President to the Board of Trustees of Cottey Junior College for the dates: July 1932, 7 October 1932, 6 Octo­ ber 1934, 22 March 1935, 28-29 October 1938, 27-28 October 1939, 28-29 March 1940, 21-22 October 1940, 24-25 October 1941, 29-30 March 1943, 29 March 1944, 25-26 October 1944, 28 March 1945, 22-23 October 1945, 25 March 1946, 23 March 1947, 26 October 1947, 30 March 1948, 5 Decem­ ber 1948, 31 March 1951, 20 October 1951, 5 April 1952, 12-13 October 1956, 17-18 October 1958, 16-17 October 1959, 21-22 October 1960, 24- 25 February 1961, 22-23 September 1961, 12-13 October 1962, 14 Octo­ ber 1963, 12-13 March 1965, Records of the Board of Trustees, Record Group 2, Cottey College Archives.

See also: Report by President Prosser on Cottey Conference, 29-30 October 1931 and Report of the President to Supreme Board of P. E. 0 ., 4 December 1931, Records of the Office of the President, Record Group 3, CCA; and Report to Supreme Board and to Cottey Board of Trustees, 19 September 1932, and Memorandum to the Board of Trustees of Cottey College from Blanche H. Dow, 10 October 1952, RG2, CCA.

See also: Faculty Minutes for 29 September 1937, 23 September 1938 and 9 March 1939 in "Faculty Minutes, 1933-1939", Faculty Minutes for 22 September 1941 and 11 September 1943 in "Faculty Minutes, 1941-1946", and Faculty Minutes for 10 September 1947 in "Faculty Minutes, 1946-1952", RG3, CCA.

See also: Dean's Reports to the President, 1939-1940, 1940-1941, 1941-1942, 1942-1943, 1943-1944, Records of the Office of the Dean, Record Group 4, CCA; and "Study of Classes Entering Cottey College in September of the Years, 1934, 1935, 1936, 1937," November 1941, "Analysis of Students Who Entered Cottey College in September, 1937", "Analysis of the 32 Students Who Graduated from Cottey in June, 1939", "Report of Class of 1940", "Curriculum Committee Study, 1940-1941" in "Curriculum Committee, 1937-1946," RG4, CCA.

See also the following articles in the P^. £. 0. Record (citations give volume number, date and page): 42 (September 1930), p. 19; 42 (November 1930), p. 19; 43 (December 1931), p. 18; 44 (April 1932), pp. 3-4; 45 (March 1933), p. 6; 45 (December 1933), p. 27; 49 (Decem­ ber 1937), p. 18; 52 (November 1940), p. 21; 53 (October 1941), pp. 21- 26; 54 (November 1942), p. 17; 57 (April 1945), p. 19; 58 (January 1946), p. 23; 58 (December 1947), p. 4; 59 (December 1947), p. 12; 62

137 138

(January 1950), p. 15; 63 (January 1951), pp. 16-17; 63 (November 1951), p. 27; 73 (October 1961), p. 16.

2. Marjorie M itchell, "Report to the Board of Trustees of Cottey Col­ lege," October 26, 1947, RG2, CCA.

3. "Board of Trustees, Cottey Junior College," Chapel, September 22, 23, 1961, RG2, CCA.

4. "Minutes, Board of Trustees, Cottey Junior College," October 12-13, 1962, RG2, CCA.

5. Marjorie M itchell, "A Report to the Board of Trustees, Cottey Jun­ ior College," October 27, 1946, RG2, CCA.

6. "Minutes of the Board of Trustees, Cottey Junior College," Hotel Muehlebach, Kansas City, Missouri, October 27, 1946, RG2, CCA.

7. "Board of Trustees, Cottey Junior College for Women," President's Office, Cottey College, November 26, 1949, RG2, CCA.

8. "Board of Trustees, Cottey Junior College for Women," Muehlebach Hotel, Kansas City, Missouri, 25 March 1950, RG2, CCA.

9. "Report of the President to the Board of Trustees," 25 March 1950, RG2, CCA.

10. "Board of Trustees, Cottey Junior College," Main H all, 28-29 October 1955, RG2, CCA; "Board of Trustees, Cottey Junior College," Art Studio, 17-18 March 1956, RG2, CCA.

11. "Turning Backward to Summer," P^. £. 0. Record 62 (November 1950), p. 17; "Cottey Junior College: A United Nations in Miniature," £. IE. 0. Record 63 (January 1951), pp. 16-17.

12. "Board of Trustees, Cottey Junior College," Main H all, 3 Novem­ ber 1950, RG2, CCA.

13. "Board of Trustees, Cottey Junior College" Library, 14, 15 March 1958, RG2, CCA.

14. Blanche H. Dow, Report to the Cottey College Board of Trustees, October, 1964, RG2, CCA.

15. Marjorie Mitchell, "A Report to the Board of Trustees, Cottey Junior College," 27 October 1946, RG2, CCA.

16. Virginia Watson, "Cottey: Cultural Melting Pot," P^. £. 0. Record 68 (October 1956), p. 16.

17. Watson, "Cottey: Cultural Melting Pot," p. 16. 139

18. Watson, "Cottey: Cultural Melting Pot," p. 16.

19. Watson, "Cottey: Cultural Melting Pot," p. 16.

20. Comparison with proportion of the national population living in communities of less than 10,000 is based on compilation of data taken from The World Almanac and Book of Facts for 1935, Ed. Robert Hunt LymanTTNew York: The New York World-Telegram, 1935), pp. 252-253, and The World Almanac and Book of Facts for 1945, Ed. E. Eastman Irvine, {New York: The New York World-Telegram, 1945), pp. 460, 485.

21. "Report of the President of Cottey College to the Board of Trus­ tees, 14, 15 A pril, 1933," RG2, CCA.

22. "Report of the President of Cottey College to the Board of Trus­ tees, 14-15 April 1933, RG2, CCA.

23. The author served on the Baccaulaureate, Awards and Commencement Committee at Cottey in the late 1960s during Ted McCarrel's administra­ tion, and remembers very large P. E. 0. subsidization of students through state P. E. 0. scholarships.

24. Marjorie M itchell, "Report to the Board of Trustees of Cottey Junior College," 26-27 October 1942, RG2, CCA; Marjorie M itchell, "Report to Board of Trustees of cottey Junior College," 25 October 1943, RG2, CCA.

25. Marjorie M itchell, "Report to Board of Trustees of Cottey Junior College," 25 October 1943, RG2, CCA.

26. Virginia Watson, "Cottey Honors Its Own," £. jJ. Record 69 (October 1957), p. 16.

27. Watson, "Cottey Honors," p. 16; Virginia Watson, "Cottey Girl Wins Fame as Woman P ilot," P. E. 0. Record 67 (September 1955), p. 22.

28. Narka Nelson, The Western College for Women, 1853-1953, (Oxford, Ohio: Western College, 1954), p. 43.

29. Cottey College Chronicle, 3: 4 (January 1893 /T8947), 6: 2 (January 1897); Helen DeRusha Troesch, The Life of Virginia Alice Cottey Stockard, (N.p.: The P. E. 0. Sisterhood, 1955), pp. 93-94.

30. "News Notes from Cottey College," P. E. 0. Record 49: 2 (February 1937), p. 15.

31. Floella P. Farley, "News from P. E. O.'s Cottey," P^. £. 0. Record 50: 2 (February 1938), pp. 18-19.

32. Joyce Girton, "What Goes on at Cottey," 2- i - 0- Record, 58: 8 (August 1946), p. 18. 140

33. Dean Helen Lieghley, "Opening Days at Cottey College," IE. 0. Record 50: 11 (November 1938), pp. 5-6.

34. Florence E. Boehmer, "Commencement at Cottey College," £. 0. Record 56: 7 (July 1934), p. 1.

35. Nancy Sahli, "Smashing: '.(omen's Relationships before the Fall," Chrysalis 8 (Summer 1979), pp. 17-27.

36. "Faculty Minutes, 1939-1940," 4 January 1940, RG3, CCA; "Student Council Minutes," 13 September 1941, CCA; "Faculty Minutes 1946-1952," 2 December 1948, RG2, CCA; Marjorie M itchell, "Report to the Board of Trustees of Cottey Junior College," 5 December 1948, RG2, CCA.

37. Betty Jameson, "Student Council Report, 1938-1939," CCA.

38. p. 12.

39. "Student Council Minutes," 5 December 1940, 5 November 1941, CCA.

40. "Faculty Minutes, 11 September 1929, 6:00 p.m.," in "Faculty Minutes, 1929-1930, 1930-1931," RG3, CCA.

41. "Faculty Figures (Old)", RG4, CCA.

42. "Faculty Week-End Leave, 1930-1931," "Faculty Minutes, 1 October 1930," in "Faculty Minutes, 1929-1930, 1930-1931," RG3, CCA.

43. "Faculty Minutes, 2 October 1929, 7:30 a.m.," in "Faculty Minutes, 1929-1930, 1930-1931," RG3, CCA.

44. "Faculty Minutes, 5 February 1930, 7:30 a.m.," in "Faculty Minutes, 1929-1930, 1930-1931," RG3, CCA.

45. "Faculty Minutes, 3 December 1930," in "Faculty Minutes, 1929-1930, 1930-1931," RG3, CCA.

46. "Faculty Minutes, 8 October 1930," in "Faculty Minutes, 1929-1930, 1930-1931," RG3, CCA.

47. "Faculty Minutes, 15 October 1930," in "Faculty Minutes, 1929-1930, 1930-1931," RG3, CCA.

48. "Faculty Minutes for 2 October 1929, 15 November 1932, 7 December 1932 and 14 December 1932, in "Faculty Minutes, 1929-1930, 1930-1931," and "Faculty Minutes, 1931-1932, 1932-1933," RG3, CCA.

49. "Report of President of Cottey College to Supreme Board of P. E. 0 ., Kansas City, Missouri, 21-22 April 1931," RG3, CCA. 141

50. "Faculty Minutes, 1933-1939," 3 November 1936, RG3, CCA.

51. Florence E. Boehmer, "President, Cottey College, Report to Supreme Convention," IP. £. 0. Record, 47 (October 1935), p. 22.

52. "Faculty Minutes, 24 September 1930," in "Faculty Minutes, 1929- 1930, 1930-1931," RG3, CCA.

53. "Faculty Minutes, 16 October 1929," in "Faculty Minutes, 1929- 1930, 1930-1931," RG3, CCA.

54. "Faculty Minutes, 1929-1930, 1930-1931," RG3, CCA.

55. "Faculty Minutes, 29 October 1930," in "Faculty Minutes, 1929-1930, 1930-1931"; "Faculty Minutes, 30 September 1931," in "Faculty Minutes, 1931-1932, 1932-1933," RG3, CCA.

56. "Faculty Minutes, 12 October 1932," in "Faculty Minutes, 1931-1932, 1932-1933," RG3, CCA.

57. "Faculty Minutes, 8 April 1931," in "Faculty Minutes, 1929-1930, 1930-1931," RG3, CCA.

58. "Report to Cottey College Board, July, 1932," RG2, CCA.

59. "Report of the President of Cottey College to the Supreme Board of the P. E. 0. Sisterhood, Nevada, Missouri, 25 September 1930," RG3, CCA.

60. George A. Wo^rks and H. C. Gregg, "Report of a Survey of Cottey College," /193%/, RG3, CCA, p. IV-1-2.

61. "Report by President Prosser on Cottey Conference, 29-30 October 1931," RG3, CCA.

62. "President's Notes on Supreme Board Meeting at Muehlebach Hotel, Kansas City, 4 December 1931," RG3, CCA.

63. "Report to Mrs. Knight, 12 December 1931," RG3, CCA.

64. "Faculty Minutes, 30 October 1932," in "Faculty Minutes, 1931- 1932, 1932-1933," RG3, CCA.

65. "Miss Mina Jargo Passed Away Sunday," Nevada /Missouri/ Daily Mai 1, 21 September 1931.

66. "Faculty Minutes, 22 September 22, 1931" and "23 September 1931" in "Faculty Minutes, 1931-1932, 1932-1933," RG3, CCA; "Funeral Services for Miss Mina Jargo Were Largely Attended," Nevada /Missouri/ Daily Mail, 23 September 1931. 142

67. "Faculty Minutes, 23 September 1931," In "Faculty Minutes, 1931- 1932, 1932-1933," RG3, CCA.

68. "Faculty Minutes, 1933-1939," 15 December 1936, RG3, CCA.

69. Stockard, First 75, p. 5.

70. Marjorie Mitchell, "Report to Board of Trustees," 27-28 March 1941, RG2, CCA; Kathryn Eldridge, "Cottey's Plans for Tomorrow," P_" E,. 0. Record 64: 11 (November 1952), p. 16.

71. Veda M. Jones, "Report of the President of Supreme Chapter, 1939- 1941," £. E. 0. Record 53: 10 (October 1941), p. 6; Cottey Junior College Catalogue, 1944-1945, pp. 7-8; Cottey College Bulletin, 1965-1967, p. 52.

72. Cottey Junior College Catalogue, 1940-1941, pp. 8-9; Nellie Homes, personal interview with the author, Nevada, Missouri, 5 February 1980.

73. Patricia A. Palmieri, "Patterns of Achievement of Single Academic Women at Wellesley College, 1880-1920," Frontiers, 1 (Spring 1980), p. 63.

74. Palmieri, "Patterns," p. 65. CHAPTER V

THE DECLINE OF WOMEN'S CULTURE AT COTTEY COLLEGE

Virginia Alice Cottey Stockard maintained her college for nearly

50 years because her vision of Cottey was shaped and sustained by her concept of exalted womanhood. She believed that women should contri­ bute to their society, preferably by exerting a moral influence directed by religious principles. She knew that education would strengthen the effect of women's influence and she created her college to imbue women with women's values and culture. Cottey was a women's world from 1884 until about 1938. From 1938 onward, however, external and internal forces undermined women's culture with the male values of the dominant culture. By 1965 Stockard's values v irtu ally had disap­ peared from her college.

The women who succeeded to Stockard's presidential chair after

1929, although nineteenth century women themselves, did not share

Stockard's vision of an autonomous women's culture. All of the presi­ dents wrestled with the nature of women's education, but a ll failed to create a concept which would provide the strength and direction to

Cottey which Stockard's vision of exalted womanhood had provided.

This chapter begins with brief biographical sketches of each of the four presidents, Mary Rose Prosser, 1929-1933; Florence E. Boehmer,

143 144

1933-1937; Marjorie M itchell, 1938-1949; and Blanche Hintnan Dow, 1949-

1965. The remainder of the chapter then describes each president's view of women's education and explains the process which enabled men's valued to assume dominance at Cottey as in the general culture.

Mary Rose Prosser, who served as president of Cottey College from

1929 to 1933, was born October 18, 1873 in Keokuk, lowa.^ No informa­ tion is available on her youth, but in 1916, at age 43, she was licensed as a registered nurse after completing a three-year training course at Clarkson Memorial Hospital, Omaha, Nebraska. Two years later she earned a Bachelor of Arts degree with highest distinction from the

University of Iowa, and at the same time received an Educational Certi­ ficate. Prosser gained teaching experience in Iowa public high schools and at the university's training school. After receiving her degree in

1918 she organized, and supervized as principal until 1926, the Perkins

School for Crippled Children which was part of the college of educa­ tion at her alma mater. In 1920 she earned a Master of Arts degree and

in 1928, at age 55, she received a Doctor of Philosophy degree from the 2 University of Iowa. Like the women who followed her in the Cottey

presidency, Prosser's doctoral studies focused on women's education.

Her dissertation investigated the effects of students' ability and time

spent in study on the scholastic achievement of 337 fir s t year women

enrolled at the University of Iowa in 1927-1928, and concluded with 3 recommendations for guidance counselling of working fir s t year women.

In 1929, at age 56, Prosser accepted the presidency of Cottey

College. During her four-year term she established an administrative 145 structure to relate P. E. 0. governance to college needs.^ Creation of a functional relationship was particularly difficult because Stockard had administered her college with benevolent autocracy and l i t t l e for­ mal structure. Transition was aggravated by some degree of opposition within the Sisterhood to accepting ownership of the college and a be­ lie f by some P. E. O.'s, encouraged by Stockard, that Cottey would create, not require, revenue. Such factors, combined with the economic depression which struck the U. S. soon after Prosser assumed the col­ lege presidency, threatened the college's survival. Prosser repaired and rebuilt a neglected physical plant, worked toward establishing faculty esprit in the lean years, and struggled to maintain enrollment.

I t was during her administration that the Sisterhood's Supreme Chapter appointed the first board of trustees for the college. Thereafter

Cottey's presidents reported directly to the board of trustees but dared not neglect the executive committee of Supreme Chapter. The structure of dual governing boards haunted and frustrated future presi­ dents.

When Prosser le ft Cottey in 1933 she was succeeded by Florence E.

Boehmer. Boehmer was born April 15, 1890 at Springfield, Missouri, c just ninety miles from her future professional home at Cottey. The

rapidly growing Queen City of the Ozarks shared in the post-Civil War

prosperity of southwest Missouri which Nevada also had enjoyed.

Springfield's population grew from 6,522 in 1880 to 21,850 in 1890.®

Such rapid demographic growth burdened educational institutions which

now needed more teachers. Boehmer earned a teacher's certificate from 146

Missouri State Teachers College in her home town and at age seventeen began teaching in local schools.^ She continued teaching until 1910.

In 1912 she earned a bachelor of arts degree at Drury College, Spring­ fie ld , and took a position in nearby Aurora High School. She served on faculties of various public high schools until 1925. While on the s ta ff of Central High School, Kansas City, Missouri (1917-1923), she completed a master of arts degree in education from the University of

Illin o is (1918). As her teaching commitments permitted, Boehmer occa­ sionally enrolled in graduate psychology and sociology courses at

Northwestern University and the University of Chicago in the years

1918 to 1932. By the mid-1920s she le ft high school teaching and began a series of posts in colleges serving as director of recreation at the

National College of Education, Evanston, Illin o is , 1926-1928; acting dean of women at Heidelberg College, T iffin , Ohio, 1928-1929; and dean of women and professor of education at Virginia State Teachers College,

Harrisonburg, Virginia, 1930-1933.®

In the early 1920s Boehmer found an interest in women's educa­

tional problems. She applied this interest to her doctoral dissertation

and analyzed vocational continuity of 6466 women who matriculated in

land grant colleges in 1889-1892, 1899-1902, 1909-1912 and 1919-1922.

Based on data collected by the U. S. Office of Education, Boehmer look­

ed for the "presence or absence of gainful employment, relation between

present employment and the occupation originally selected, occupational

stability, /sTn^/ relation between training received in college, and oc- g cupations followed." On the basis of her study she recommended that 147 land grant colleges recognize their responsibility to provide iviore educational and vocational guidance. In 1932 she received the doctor of philosophy degree in education from Columbia University with a major in educational guidance of women andgirls.A year later, on July 1,

1933, she began service as President of Cottey College under a three- year, $2500 per year contract.

The economic, enrollment and governance problems of Prosser's ad­ ministration extended throughout Boehmer's administration in the 1930s.

Boehmer struggled to help the college survive in the face of the con­ tinuing depression crisis and slipping enrollments. She repeatedly but vainly applied for accreditation to the regional accrediting agency.

I t was the governance issue, however, that most challenged her adminis­

trative s k ill. She was caught in the unenviable position of balancing presidential responsiveness to the newly created board of trustees and

to the Supreme Chapter of P. E. 0. at a time when the relationship of

the boards with each other and with the college administration was un­

defined and misunderstood by members of the two boards. She also

discovered the crucial necessity of educating the Sisterhood's general

membership to its responsibility for the college. The hostile economic

environment which the college faced was accentuated by fundamental

conflicts of governance rooted in poorly defined structure and func­

tions and reluctant support or open h o s tility from some P. E. O.'s.

Boehmer won a year's extension to her original contract though the

board firm ly declined to give her more than four years to solve the

massive problems. No specific reason is found in o ffic ia l records for 148 the board's decision not to renew her contract.

The Cottey trustees had chosen no successor to Boehmer by the time she le f t the presidency even though they had decided months ear­ lier to release her. To administer the college while a presidential search was undertaken, they appointed Dr. Orpha Stockard acting presi­ dent. Orpha Stockard, who was not related to the founder, was about

forty years old when she became acting president of the college. Born at Bois D'Arc, Missouri, a small town northwest o ' Springfield, she earned her bachelor of science degree at Southwest Missouri State

Teachers College in Springfield, and the master of arts and doctor of 12 philosophy degrees in English from the University of Missouri. She

entered the Cottey faculty in 1933 as head of the English department, 13 and became Dean of the Faculty upon completing her doctorate in 1935.

She continued on the faculty until her retirement in 1966. L ittle ad­

ditional information is available on her background. She carried out

her responsibilities as acting president in a care-taking capacity

and apparently was given no authority to make any significant changes

in the college during her term. For this reason her brief administra­

tion is not studied here in detail. She is mentioned because she f i t

the pattern of single, professional women who served Cottey as presi­

dents.

The fifth president of Cottey College arrived on campus to assume

her duties on duly 29, 1 9 3 8 . Marjorie Mitchell was unanimously

chosen by the board of trustees from a long lis t of applicants and

unanimously approved by the executive board of Supreme Chapter. 149

Originally declining the board's invitation to consider the presidency,

Mitchell later met the board at Kansas City in A pril, 1938, and accept­ ed their offer of the position after visiting the campus.The sense of independence which she displayed from the beginning of her associa­ tion with the college was evident throughout her administration.

Mitchell was born June 11, 1897 at Geneva, Ohio. She attended the public schools of Ashtabula, Ohio, before entering the College for

Women of Western Reserve University. When her father died she inter­ rupted her college education to teach in the Ashtabula public schools for a year, returned to Western Reserve in September, 1917, and earned an A. B. in English in 1920. She worked for a Cleveland surgeon for a time and then served eighteen months as graduate assistant in English and American history at the College for Women. In 1922 she spent twelve weeks touring Ita ly , France, Scotland and England, and upon re­ turning to the United States, entered the graduate program at Radcliffe

College. She completed her A. M. degree in English there in 1923.

In September 1923 Mitchell became instructor in English at the

University of Akron. She remained at this institution until 1938 when she moved to the Cottey presidency. Gradually she rose through the ranks at Akron becoming director of freshman English, then in 1930 assistant professor of English and advisor for women, and in 1933 assistant professor of English and dean of women. As opportunities arose in the summers, she continued her education--in 1924 at the Uni­ versity of Chicago, in 1925 touring England, and in 1929 at Teachers

College, Columbia University.When she requested a sabbatical year. 150

1929-1930, the president of Akron University "suggested that she study

10 in the field of college administration rather than in English."

She accepted this advice and pursued educational administration at

Columbia 1929-1930, 1937-1938 and the summer of 1938 when she was a candidate for a doctor of education degree.

Mitchell was at the point of writing her doctoral dissertation when she became president of Cottey in 1938. Her decision to accept the presidency at this stage of her degree program proved fatefu l.

Two years after moving to Cottey, in December 1940, Missouri Hall, which served as campus residence for Mitchell and several faculty mem­ bers, burned to the ground. The disaster destroyed all of Mitchell's dissertation materials.Such a setback did not deter her. She chose a new research project and reported to the board of trustees in late 1942 that she would study enrollment and student continuity of Of) five Cottey classes. In the second semester, 1942-1943, with her board's approval, Mitchell took a leave, returned to Columbia Univer­ sity and worked to complete her dissertation. "My work for the doctorate has progressed so w ell," she told the Cottey board in March,

"that i t w ill not be necessary for me to return to New York unless

the Committee disagrees seriously over the final document. I anti c i- 21 pate finishing the study in the summer." For an unknown reason,

however, the degree was never awarded to M itchell. The honorary degree

awarded her by Iowa Wesleyan College in 1942 was the only doctorate 22 she ever received. 151

In great part it was Mitchell's attention to detail and efforts to economize that enabled her to bring the college to new levels of pros­ perity and progress during her eleven-year term. 'lith in three years after she arrived on campus Cottey was accredited by the North Central

Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools. Through her s tric t administrative leadership the college survived the last years of the depression and new wartime adjustments. Expansion of enrollment from

91 resident students in 1938-1939 to 150 resident students in 1948-1949 brought concomitant expansion of the physical plant. Two dormitories were b u ilt, land was purchased which la te r became sites for a third dormitory and a chapel, and a recreational park less than a mile from campus was added to the college for student and faculty use. I t was

Mitchell who broke the tradition of an all-woman faculty; the addition of male faculty members brought significant changes which contributed to the masculinization of the college.

Mitchell worked smoothly with her board of trustees, but i t was the public relations aspect of her job that she least enjoyed. An­ nually she was invited to speak at several state P. E. 0. conventions and she fe lt duty bound to attend them. She considered i t an ordeal, however, to convince the P. E. 0. members of the merits of the college they owned. In March, 1946, she told the board.

Frankly, I do not like my job anymore; yet I can see that somebody has to do i t ; I'm w illing to try being a promoter a couple of years more, for certainly I had rather be up and at 'em than sittin g home patiently contemplating urgent need for money.

In early 1947 Mitchell resigned only to have the board convince her to 152 remain at the college. Finally, however, at the December 1948 board meeting Mitchell resigned unequivocably. "You a ll know," she said, 24 "that I have not been satisfied for several years." Mitchell was tired of her job and could only "hope that someone else may have a different vision and be able to accomplish a cooperative result with the officers of the Sisterhood which I no longer believe is possible for me."^^

Had Mitchell chosen her own successor she could have made no better choice than Blanche H. Dow. Where Mitchell's strength was ad­ ministration, Dow's was public relations. Unlike Prosser, Boehmer and

M itchell, Dow was not a member of the Sisterhood yet she cultivated a warm respect from P. E. O.'s across the nation, and over her sixteen years as president of Cottey she achieved greater public awareness of

the college than the institution ever before enjoyed.

Dow was born February 9, 1893 at Louisiana, Missouri, where her 2fi father was president of McCune College. She was the first-born child

of her mother, 22-year old Carrie Ann Reneau Dow, who showered her

with affection and kept a journal of "my 'angelchild'", from the time 27 she was 10-months old until she was 17 years old.

Dow's family moved frequently between Missouri and Massachusetts

and her father, an ordained Baptist minister, alternated his career in

the pulpit when they lived in Massachusetts, with his career as an

educator when they lived in Missouri. His service as president of

several Missouri colleges through the years influenced Blanche Dow to 153 become a teacher.

Dow graduated from Smith College with a bachelor of arts degree in

1913 and accepted a teaching position at Milwaukee-Downer Siminary. A year later she joined her family at Gallatin, Missouri, where her father was president of Grand River College. Here she taught French and coached dramatics. The family remained at Gallatin until 1918 when fir e destroyed the college. When her family moved to Liberty, Missouri,

Dow took a position in the office of A. M. Dickery, former governor of

Missouri, who now served as Third Postmaster in the Post Office De­ partment in Washington, D. C. Her primary interest while in Washington was drama, and she joined the Garrick Players at the Schubert Theatre in the capital city. After a year combining the drama of the theatre with the routine of the post office department, she returned to her family's profession, teaching, when the Board of Regents of District

Five Normal School at Maryville, Missouri, hired her to teach French 28 and dramatics. She remained at this institution for th irty years after 1919 until she was elected to the presidency of Cottey College.

While on the faculty at Maryville she earned the master's degree in

French from Columbia University in 1925 and a doctorate in French in 20 1935. Like Prosser, Boehmer and Mitchell before her, Dow focused her early academic study on women's role. Her dissertation traced the

lif e of Christine de Pisan who defended women in the early fifteenth 30 century French lite ra ry quarrel over the nature and role of women.

At Maryville, Dow joined other young women from the faculty in the

local branch of the American Association of University Women (AAUW) 154 organized in 1918 by Olive DeLuce, instructor of art at the normal school. Dow and DeLuce soon formed a friendship which ended only 50 years later with DeLuce's death. Together they build the house in which they lived at Maryville, and through the years they shared many travels at home and abroad. "American One-Night Stand: I run," is

Dow's entertaining account of one of their adventures, this one in a

Basque villege. Their friendship continued through their separation when Dow moved to Cottey and DeLuce remained at Maryville. In 1955

Dow returned to Maryville to deliver the dedicatory address for the new Olive DeLuce Fine Arts Building. When DeLuce died in 1970 Dow served as executrix of her estate and officially presented the Percival

DeLuce Memorial Art Collection to Northwest Missouri State University

31 (formerly the normal school) on behalf of the estate. Dow and DeLuce shared an interest in AAUW and both held numerous local, state and

regional offices. Dow was state president in 1937-1939 and served in

several national posts in AAUW as well as positions in the Interna­

tional Federation of University Women. In 1963, two years before she

retired from the Cottey presidency, she began a four-year term as

national president of AAUW.

The fir s t four presidents hired by the P. E. 0. Sisterhood for

Cottey College were unique for their time as women who held leadership

positions. In many other respects, also,they shared much in common.

Except for Prosser they a ll were born in the 1890s. All of them work­

ed hard for their education. Prosser received her Ph.D. ten years

after completing her bachelor's degree program, and i t took Boehmer 155

20 years and Dow 23 years to make the same step. Although Mitchell never completed her doctorate she was admitted to candidacy 18 years after receiving her bachelor's degree when she was 41 years old. All of the other women were past 40 when they fin a lly received th eir Ph.D. degrees: Prosser was 55, Boehmer was 42 and Dow was 43. Boehmer,

Mitchell and Dow a ll studied in doctoral programs at Columbia Univer­

sity. All four women studied some aspect of women's roles in society

as their doctoral research project. Prosser, Boehmer and Mitchell be­

longed to the P. E. 0. Sisterhood. Dow was not a P. E. 0 ., and after

she became president of Cottey she carefully avoided invitations to

join, preferring instead to maintain independence for the sake of her

administration. Finally, all of the women chose to remain single

throughout their lives.

The biographies of Prosser, Boehmer, Mitchell and Dow reveal

strength, determination and dedication of the sort previously demon­

strated at Cottey by Virginia Alice Cottey Stockard. Through their

capable administration of the college, Cottey survived and prospered.

The four presidents enlarged the physical fa c ilitie s and brought larger

enrollments to the campus, changes which Stockard surely would have

applauded. At the same time, however, they failed to perpetuate the

women's culture upon the values of which Stockard had founded her in­

stitution . Stockard had envisioned women's higher education as a

means to achieve exalted womanhood--a state of individual autonomy and

s e lf-fu lfillm e n t in which women would exert moral suasion to u p lift

the family, community and society in which they lived. Education, in 156 other words, was a means to an end. The four presidents who succeed­ ed her, however, considered education to be an end in its e lf, and they floundered in th eir attempts to ju stify Cottey's educational mission.

As a consequence, Cottey was masculinized--the male values of the dominant culture subsumed women's values at the college. To under­ stand the roles of the four presidents in this masculinization process, we must understand how each of the four women responded to women's culture. None of them specifically referred to women's culture but their concepts of women's education reflect their cultural focus. The remainder of this chapter discusses their educational philosophies relevant to women, and describes the gradual takeover of the college by the values of the dominant culture.

Prosser's vision of Cottey's role in women's education emphasized the religious principles which Stockard originated for the institution.

"The college endeavors to maintain," Prosser said, "a religious at­ mosphere which is wholesome and free from dogmatism and which seeks the 32 development of Christian character." The college continued its non- denominational tradition although Protestant a ffilia tio n s clearly dominated the student body. Prosser expected her faculty to support the college's religious mission, but sometimes they required rather blunt reminders from her to attend their religious duties. At a

faculty meeting on April 13, 1932, "Dr. Prosser requested that all

faculty members attend vespers and Wednesday morning chapel service 33 regularly." The institution's traditional goal of religious educa­

tion clearly was taken seriously by the administration. 157

Prosser incorporated the mission of P. E. 0. into her vision of

Cottey's purpose. She reminded the Sisterhood of—

the unique opportunity granted to P. E. 0. to do what no other women's organization had had a chance to do, or is likely to have a chance to do, that is to build a school for women that shall have.an outstanding place in the lif e of the country.

She envisioned bringing "together at Cottey a group of gifted leaders, leaders in every phase of lif e and culture, whose names would bring us students from a ll parts of the country. We could so surround them with all that is fine and beautiful," she said, "that their rich oc heritage would flower into lovely, cultivated womanhood." Prosser's vision reflects the twentieth century image of Stockard's ideal woman.

Prosser believed a nurturing environment of all that is fine and beau­ tiful tempered by religious principles would enable girls to flower into a lovely, cultivated womanhood similar in all but name to

Stockard's exalted womanhood. The mission and values of Cottey, then, changed very l i t t l e during Prosser's administration.

In noted contrast to Stockard's exalted womanhood which envi­ sioned educating women to serve God as mothers, missionaries or teach­ ers, on the other hand, Boehmer's educational emphasis shifted to vocational preparation and self-fulfillment outside a religious con­ text. This sh ift reflected the conflict-ridden transition of ideals of

American womanhood in the larger society from the traditional nurturing role within the home to a combination of nurturance with political and economic roles outside the home. The contrast of the competing ideals is illustrated vividly in a comparison of ideas expressed by the 158 keynote speaker at Cottey's fiftiety-year celebration in 1934 with

Boehmer's ideas of women's education. The competing ideologies are described here in some detail to illu s tra te the contrast of men's and women's cultural values.

Theophil William Henry Irio n , Dean of the School of Education at the University of Missouri (Columbia), addressed the celebrants at

Cottey's semi-centennial on the topic of women's education and role in society. Irion recognized women's struggles for ‘‘equality of rights," but he thought suffrage was the focus of a ll women's efforts for justice and that the struggle for suffrage was solely a negative movement. "So far," he said, "woman's e ffo rt has been in the direction of destroying that unjust inequality the utter humiliation of which could be measured only by high-minded and in tellig en t, educated women."

He continued, "So far her struggle has been that of breaking down re­ strictions and limitations, but I am confident that her future endeavor will be positive and constructive and that her contribution to modern societary lif e w ill be noble and worthy of American womanhood."

While Irion applauded women's political gains he also identified consequent penalties. He complained that p o litic a lly emancipated women behaved like men in the sense of striving for self-aggrandize­ ment.

So long has been the struggle for recognition and for the equality of rights that the habit of looking for some advantage to herself has crept into the thinking of the modern woman when she attempts to assume a forward outlook. Basically that attitude is unnatural to women who are by and largely more inclined to altruism and 159

shrink readily from the ruthless competitiveness so markedly present especially in man's commercial enter­ prises, a ruthlessness which can find no ju stificatio n either in sportsmanship or in humaneness, and on that account must invent its basis for respectibility in the shallow dictim that 'business is business'.

Irion urged women to avoid adopting male values. The ideal woman­ hood which he thought Cottey women should achieve barkened back to the nineteenth century; "May I venture to suggest that woman w ill achieve true greatness in the future, i f in looking forward, while

insisting upon and carefully guarding her rights, she plans neverthe­

less in true womanly self-forgetfulness to labor constructively for

the common good for mankind. And when such a generous and construc­

tive forward outlook is assumed, what vistas of true usefulness 38 unfold!" And for what was i t that women should so self-forgetfully

strive? "'!hen modern woman has turned her face forward and has lent

her way to walking in truth, justice and beauty, 'redeeming this gen­

eration', then may her s p irit be exalted and her voice be uplifted in

the great 'magnificat': "My soul doth magnify the Lord,—for behold, 39 from henceforth a ll generations shall call me blessed.'"

Although Irion entitled his address, "Looking Forward," he re­

duced women to the male perspective of pre-industrial roles. The ideal

toward which women should strive was to become an ornament walking in

"truth, justice and beauty."

In contrast to Irion, Boehmer clearly understood the new roles

available to women in the twentieth century. "Gone are the days,"

she said, "when a g irl went into wage earning only because her father 160 was unable to support her. Gone are the days when women think of oc­ cupation only as something to f i l l in the time before marriage.

Modern young women are taking their occupational planning and th eir occupational preparation seriously."^® Boehmer enthusiastically wel­ comed her opportunity to affect women's education as president of

Cottey. "Education is living," she believed, and the fundamental aim must be to teach students the a b ility to think independently in a changing world, "for i t is not possible to teach absolutes.

Boehmer directed her institution toward a broad liberal arts edu­ cation and defined eight educational aims for Cottey tailored to the 42 institution's female clientele:

1. "A lasting interest in learning."

2. "Vocational intelligence." Cottey should provide vocational counselling to help the student select a vocation, to understand the necessary preparation for the vocation and how education for one fie ld might be applied to another fie ld , and to give the student sufficient education either to enter a fie ld of work or to prepare her for a more specialized education in a four-year institution.

3. "Appreciation of leisure and a b ility to use i t for the pursuit of genuinely satisfying experiences."

4. "Some knowledge of the social sciences." In economics students

should understand consumer problems; in sociology, the family and other

intimate groups; in po litical economy, the theories of government and

the responsibilities of citizenship.

5. "Health intelligence." 161

6. "Reasonable intelligence about food, clothing, and housing."

Home economics was of crucial importance to women's education, Boehmer believed. "Because of the wide variety of kinds of work growing out of this general field of learning and also because of the fact that such work is the modern expression of woman's social heritage we would recommend home economics highly as a specialized vocational education."

But Boehmer also recognized home economics as a preparation for women's role as consumers whether or not they majored in home economics. A study of home economics would enable a woman to "make wise selection of food for herself and for others. . . buy clothing intelligently. . .

judge reasonably well of values in furniture and household equipment."

7. "Social poise."

8. "Quickened sense of spiritual values"--which included "a re­ sponsiveness to beauty and nobility /an^/ a reverence for the divine."

Boehmer thus shifted Cottey's religious goal from the evangelical to the ecumenical. She transformed Stockard's Methodist missionary fire to a more generalized conception of s p iritu a lity which embraced all other possibilities of religious expression.

Boehmer's educational goals for Cottey significantly broadened the educational and vocational possibilities for women from those pre­ viously encouraged by the college. She recognized education as a lifetim e process. She knew that many of the women who attended Cottey would work outside the home at some point during their lives and she wanted to assure that they had adequate training to evaluate their 162 vocational opportunities and to enter occupations satisfying to them­ selves. She believed that home economics, a fie ld which might seem in retrospect to hold women close to the home, offered many new opportun­ ities ^or women, but her ideas represented a broader definition of women's occupations than Cottey previously had employed. Boehmer also recognized that preparation for intelligent consumerism was crucial to all of the women who passed through Cottey. She re a lis tic a lly recog­ nized that women of her time performed functions of consumers, and she wanted her students to be adequately prepared for these purposes.

Boehmer's shift in definition of spiritual values from the evan­ gelical to the ecumenical reflects a broader societal sh ift from the nineteenth century to the post-World War One twentieth century. At no

time did she assert the nineteenth century concept of women's respon­

s ib ility for the nation's social morality. She considered woman

neither as spiritual sanctuary nor as social housekeeper. Her defini­

tion of education individualized and humanized women. She emphasized

the intellectual and spiritual fulfillment of women as individuals and

removed from their shoulders the ambivalent nineteenth century standard

which placed on them responsibility for social values but denied them

power to achieve those values in the larger society.

Boehmer also recognized the effects of economics on higher educa­

tion. "There is a growing conviction," she said, "that the changing

economic order w ill tend to raise the age at which our young people 163 w ill begin wage earning a c tivities . That means more and more of them w ill remain in school for several years beyond the high school level.

Thus she recognized the effects on the family of industrialization and capitalist development. In response to the extended childhood brought on by industrialization, she advocated a solid liberal arts preparation as a lifetim e educational foundation.

Boehmer, then, recognized the duality of women's roles in the twentieth century. She attempted to design Cottey's educational cur­ riculum not only to prepare women for their domestic functions with food, clothing, housing and children, but also to prepare them for a vocation. At the same time she also wanted her students to develop a quickened sense of spiritual values, but she made no pretense at mak­ ing religious principles the foundation of women's role in society as had Stockard. Thus, Boehmer abandoned Stockard's nineteenth century cultural concept of exalted woman, and she offered no comparable set of values in its place.

Reflecting on the nineteenth century debate whether women should have the same education as men, Boehmer said i t was proved "that women have intellectual equality with men" and "that women can put their disciplined intellects to work effectively at the tasks that are en- 44 gaging the efforts of men." As for the future, Boehmer said.

We are now ready to enter upon a new era in the education of women. We women are ready to ask ourselves seriously whether we want—and whether we sould want—to engage in activities identical with those of men, and as a corol­ lary, whether the aims of our college education should be identical with the aims of the college education of men. 164

Why shouldn't they? But, just as logically, why should they? As colleges--all colleges--give serious con­ sideration to a definition of aims in terms of life needs, essential differences in the social functions of men and women may emerge. I f they do, the aims of education in colleges for women will be affected. It is entirely possible that the differences, i f there are any, w ill be in emphasis rather than in essential nature.

She anticipated that future women would enjoy much greater 1 attitude in occupational choice and that their education would parallel men's education.

Boehmer stood at the fulcrum of nineteenth and twentiety century women's values. She believed that industrialized twentieth century

America offered yet unrecognized and unexploited opportunities for women to achieve autonomy in ways unavailable to women a score of years e a rlie r. She spanned the transition from one era to another.

No longer were separate spheres for women and men viable. The diluted economic functions of the home forced women to enter the economic world outside the home. Women's and men's spheres, so disparate in the nineteenth century, now converged. Simultaneously, the value structure which supported separate spheres only a generation before now faced reordering to ju s tify the convergence of the spheres.

Boehmer recognized that some women would choose to adhere to the old value system but that other women would choose to participate in

the new economic political and social activities available to women in what formerly was considered men's sphere. She mistakenly believed,

however, that with education women could enter men's sphere without

losing th eir autonomy--that the best values of Victorian culture could 165 merge with twentieth century economic necessity. She sought to pre­ pare Cottey women for this possibility through a comprehensive educational program which would combine the best of women's values with

those of the dominant culture.

Boehmer failed to consider deceptions inherent in the system,

however. When women attempted to escape the rigid strictures of women's sphere and eagerly entered men's sphere, only then did they

learn, after losing their autonomy, that this new world operated on

Blackstone's principle. William Blackstone, an eighteenth century

English ju ris t, interpreted English common law to mean that when a man and woman marry they become one, and that one is the man. In

effect, as women learned in the twentieth century, this general princi­

ple was applied by men to women whenever women entered any occupation,

fie ld or activity outside women's Victorian sphere. Women might enter

a fie ld , but men held the power and made the decisions.

I t was decades before women realized what was happening. For a

long while they believed a ll that was required of them in this new

world was to conform as closely as possible to standards set by men.

Many eastern women's colleges founded in the late nineteenth century

thus adopted the curriculum of men's colleges, loehmer resisted the

pressure to conform to men's standards and sought, instead, to merge

women's and men's values. Four years as president of Cottey College

were too brief a period to accomplish her ends, however, and she le ft

the presidency before she succeeded in blending the two cultures. 166

When Mitchell became president she brought to Cottey a rejection of women's values in favor of the values of the dominant culture. Upon taking office in 1938 she gave her P. E. 0. sisters a qualified declar­ ation of faith . "I believe in education for women with a ll my heart," she said, but added, "I believe that women should be educated, but that there is not, necessarily, one right way, as yet, to conduct that edu­ cationalprocess.Elaborating her idea she said,

A woman is more easily lost on a large campus than is a man, and suffers more from the experience. She natur­ ally plays second fiddle in the matter of offices. And yet, in the future ahead of the present young woman, how much more than ever before is she likely to need the a b ility to decide important matters for herself, to carry heavy responsibilities, and to be capable of wise leader­ ship.

I t would seem evident that the years which elapse between her arrival at young adulthood and her marriage should be spent in preparing herself for every contingency which may be prepared for. I t would seem that society would be well repaid for the costs of such preparation. The trouble is that we do not know what,the content and method of such education should be.

M itchell's discussion of women's education is significant because of its implications for Cottey. In regard to curriculum, she confes­ sed that she had no idea what was the best education for women. While she recognized that women in the future would carry heavy responsibi­ litie s , she proposed nothing to prepare Cottey women for the decision­ making and leadership which she envisioned for them. Mitchell recognized that women students frequently were lost on large campuses and she attempted, by contrast, to show the virtues of Cottey's small size. But why did she not also understand that women were lost in the 167 professions? She acknowledged that Cottey served to f i l l its students' time between young adulthood and marriage. But was tim e -fillin g an adequate ju stificatio n for Cottey's existence? M itchell, herself, was unmarried as were most of the women who taught at Cottey. Why did she make no allowance in Cottey's program to meet the special needs of women entering occupational roles outside the home and of women who might choose not to marry?

Mitchell's concern that Cottey students be prepared "for every con­ tingency, which may be prepared for" established an impossible goal for her students. Whereas education for men focused on specific career goals, the attempt to prepare women for every possible contingency so diluted their liberal arts education that they were unable to relate to their environment in any but the traditional gender roles established for them.

Mitchell's concept of women's education remained non-specific throughout her stay at Cottey. In 1940 she referred to the "sound moral, social, and cultural as well as academic training" which she 48 believed Cottey should provide. Two years later she outlined an educational plan for women which she thought would serve them through the next forty years. Her plan included an emphasis on health, a var­ iety in knowledge, discipline, a recognition of the importance of volunteerism, leadership, Christian character, and enthusiasm for the job. During the war-time emergency she believed women must maintain their health so that the medical profession could serve the armed forces. Furthermore, good health promoted efficiency. Although she 168 emphasized leadership for her students, she made no significant pro­ vision for them to learn leadership skills at Cottey. Her emphasis on volunteerism reinforced the traditional gender roles in Cottey's edu­ cational scheme.

Beginning in the fa ll semester of 1942-1943, a ll students working toward a degree were required to complete a course in health education.

This course was to make students aware of health as a way oflife, and prepare them for another course in body building, "for increased en­ durance, improved muscular skills and a general toughening up."^^

The emphasis on health, although not nexessarily physical fitness, con­ tinued into the post-war years and in 1947 Mitchell described to her board a new required English course which combined composition, speech and a general course in healtheducation.In the following spring, however, the health segment was dropped and current history was added as part of this course. During M itchell's administration, curricular and extra-curricular activities were designed to bring every student into some contact with music every day.^^ The music program continued a tradition begun by the founder of placing strong emphasis on music in the daily lives of students.

A more significant element in the curriculum, however, was a course in family relationships. First taught in the spring semester of

1937-1938, i t remained in the curriculum throughout M itchell's and

Dow's administrations. Marie Davis, the sociology instructor who o ri­ ginated the course, structured Family Relationships in four units. The fir s t unit concerned the development of the family as an institution. 169

Unit Two taught the effects of contemporary events on the family.

Such developments as the machine age, urbanization, World War I , and the changing status of women were used to examine the family as a social unit of behavior. In Unit Three students studied the functions of courtship, mate selection, the dangers of premarital petting, and

the physical, mental, emotional and biological adjustments to the mar­

riage relationship including "weddings, clothing, and home furnishings

in keeping with the pocketbook of the bride's parents and the pros,

pective bridegoom." Unit Four dealt with possible improvements in the

family, "such as more stringent marriage and divorce laws; the need for

education of a ll young people in regard to family relationships; the

economic changes that would render familylife more secure and abun- 52 dant." The course taught conformity to gender roles at the cost of women's autonomy.

According to Davis, the course reached six conclusions; in other

words, the course taught six values. By "family" the course referred

to a husband, wife and their children. The course taught, firs t, that

the family is the product of an evolutionary process--"the best in s ti­

tution that man has been able to perfect"--and that it is unlikely to

change in outward form. Davis either did not believe in evolution as

a continuing process or she presumed that only with the family did

evolution stop. The second point in the course was that the family

has given up many former duties, such as education, to the government

and that in turn the government expects the family to teach responsi­

b ility . Third, the family must teach emotional control and self 170 discipline. The fourth point, that the desirable family type is equalitarian rather than patriarchal, matriarchal, or child centered, gave no indication, however, that Davis taught any but the traditional gender roles in this course. The last two points in the course were that the family should be more involved in constructive recreation and that the family must remain flexib le enough to adjust to the needs of society.

I t was courses such as this which Betty Friedan later identified as one source of women's indoctrination with the "feminine mystique.

I t is important to realize, however, that the indoctrination process began at least a quarter century before Friedan identified i t and the process had mixed consequences.

In the immediate post-war period Mitchell perceptively called the attention of her P. E. 0. sisters to a trend later documented by

Friedan in The Feminine Mystique. Mitchell asked.

Have you noticed that the women's magazines have recent­ ly discovered that charm is not enough? They have progressed from te llin g us how to make up our faces to urging us to make up our minds. They have fin a lly look­ ed about them and discovered that not even Lifebuoy nor Listerine will assure life's complete happiness for every subscriber. We are now being analyzed as sufferers from something more horrible than pink toothbrush! We are a ll in danger of becoming neurotics!

But like so many other American women, Mitchell seemed to accept this

evaluation of their condition. She concluded that "neuroses are

mostly devices for escapaing responsibility," and assured her P. E. 0.

listeners, "We try earnestly to make our young women learn to accept 171 1.56 responsibility and like it.

M itchell's rejection of women's values and acceptance of men's values in the dominant culture is nowhere more evident than in her views on women's relationships with each other. At her fir s t meeting with the faculty in 1938, she discussed the issue of faculty-student relations and pointedly informed the faculty that they were respon­ sible for preventing student crushes. Faculty meeting minutes report her views:

In regard to chaperoning, i t was to be hoped that all would be w illing to chaperone: teaching loads are not heavy, almost too lig h t. I t does give at least a sense of knowledge of every student for the faculty. There is a difference between being an adviser and friend and being a crony. I t is assumed that the student can see each individual in her normal personality. There is something wrong with the instructor with whom this is not so; such a person should not even be in the class­ room. The faculty was selected for training in subject matter and for their interest in young people. There is alwaysythe d iffic u lty of "crishes" in a women's college.

Mitchell had not been on campus long enough to know the nature of

faculty-student relations at Cottey and could not have been commenting on the local situation. Presumably she prejudged the situation at

Cottey on the basis of some other experience--perhaps her year at Rad-

c liffe College, 1922-1923, when she studied for her master's degree.

Whatever the cause, her borderline homophobia case suspicions on

faculty behavior as well as that of students.

By the end of her eleven years at Cottey, however, M itchell's

views of women's relationships—even those on a college campus--had 172 mellowed. In 1949 she told the P. E. O.'s in reference to the suite

arrangement in the residence halls that dormitories are not merely

housing, but offer students a way of lif e . The student "learns to

live with nine others who are her equals in age and social importance,

as she might have lived in a family of many children before such

families went out of style.A few weeks earlier Mitchell told the

P. E. O.'s that the college had no desire to eliminate young men from

the lives of th eir students, but that the Cottey student also needed

to realize, "that many of her social satisfactions, especially in her

later years, must come from friendships with women," and that "two

years living among them, working out student projects with them and

sharing their joys and sorrows is a greatly enriching experience and 59 one from which she w ill p ro fit a ll the rest of her life." The new

generation had not been reared in an atmosphere of female supportive­

ness; they had to be taught i t . There is no clearer statement that

the nineteenth century "female world oflive and ritu al" had ended.

Without a well-defined philosophy of women's education, Mitchell

reformed Cottey's academic program significantly. Whereas Boehmer

modified Stockard's emphasis on teacher education and religious service

toward an education designed to prepare women for such gender-related

occupations outside the home as secretarial and home economics careers,

Mitchell vacillated in the type of educational program she thought the

college should offer. The board of trustees approved her recommenda­

tion to discontinue the teacher training curriculum after the 1939-1940

year.®^ Mitchell's rationale for this change was that teachers could 173 not be prepared adequately in two years, that the University of Mis­ souri accrediting committee said that teacher training would be eliminated from junior colleges, and that teacher training curriculum

is expensive—in the 1938-1939 year only five students were enrolled in the 17 hours of teacher education courses.Although at first Mit­ chell included home economics, nursing and secretarial studies in

Cottey's program, by 1946 she urged the board to eliminate secretarial studies and home economics because of low student enrollment in these areas.

M itchell, herself an educated, professional woman, saw no pur­

pose for women's education except to fill time before marriage. Recog­

nizing declining student interest in the traditional women's

occupations of teaching, secretarial work and home economics, she e li­

minated courses in these areas without offering any alternatives.

Seizing on the new trend of liberal arts education she directed

Cottey's curriculum exclusively toward liberal arts hoping that her

students thus would be prepared for every eventuality in their fu­

ture, but she failed to incorporate into the liberal arts the values

which trad itio nally had sustained women's culture. Mitchell wanted

Cottey women to be healthy, disciplined, enthusiastic ladies, capable

of leadership when necessary, women who expressed the qualities of

Christian character and recognized their duties as volunteers in their

communities. At Cottey, students learned the history, functions and

responsibilities of traditional family relationships. It was such edu­

cation of women as that offered at Cottey in the 1940s that helped 174 produce the isolated, dependent, manipulated qualities of the feminine mystique identified by Friedan in the 1960s.

Women's values now were eclipsed by the need for each woman to adapt to men's values of the dominant culture in order to survive, whether as housewife or housewife/career woman. Few women at this time identified solely with careers rather than the home. That Mit­ chell and her women colleagues at Cottey, with the support of the

P. E. 0. Sisterhood, helped their young women mark time before mar­ riage, confirms Mary R itter Beard's criticism of women's education.

Speaking to the centennial celebration at Mount Holyoke College in

1937, Beard observed that women abandoned women's ideals and principles when they entered institutions of higher education and blindly adopted male values.

In adopting the illusion that they had been nothing with respect to education, in cutting loose from their own vast heritage of knowledge, experience, and thought, in casting o ff the ennobling memory of them­ selves, women lost their bearings as women and therefore as human beings a ll of whom are either men or women. Thus when the doors of institutions of formal learning were unlocked for them, they too lig h tly accepted as education the body of knowledge and the developing doctrines which the masters of those institutions deemed to be education in its fulness.

Beard further asserted, "that formal education to which women had won

access and which was said to be such a blessing repudiated and con­

demned every humane tradition of the education which had been woman's 65 heritage from the Enlightenment."

When Dow became president of Cottey, she, like Mitchell, fully

relied on principles of the liberal arts to sustain Cottey's destiny. 175

Liberal arts, she said, are "language, the greatest achievement of the race, history, its long record of failu re and success, triumph and disaster, science, the key to the physical world, and a r t, the achieve­ ment of his aspiring spirit as its heart, its core, its lifeline.

She saw three dimensions of liberal arts--

breadth to establish a basis for understanding the enormous achievement of mankind, the supurb heritage of the past, the possible reach of the future; depth to see comparisons, relationships, to discover meaning, to establish value; height to awaken the creative power, to ^ tir the imagination, to give wings to thought and nobility to act.

Dow hardly could have been unaware of women's condition in so­ ciety. Even on her own campus, a close associate. Dr. Anna L. Rose

Hawkes, raised the issue of appropriate education for women. When

Dow succeeded Hawkes as national AAUW president in 1963 she invited

Hawkes to serve as acting dean of students at Cottey while Beverly

Gunstone took a sabbatical leave to work on her doctorate. Hawkes wrote an a rtic le published in the P. E. 0. Record in which she describ­ ed how women's education was second-rate. "In a thousand subtle ways young women in college and even in high school are propelled by their counsellors toward soft courses, pushed into so-called women's occu­ pations, and turned away from science and mathematics and philosophy,"

she said. And she continued--

Consider the waste of human resources b u ilt up by this attitude toward the abilities and talents of women. Women constitute not only an essential but a distinctive part of our human resources and yet in the need for more talent to f i l l the vacancies in the required work of our modern, complex, automated c iv iliza tio n , the notion is being perpetuated that leadership, scholarship and administrative aptitude are not human qualities 176

found in all gifted persons, but are the property of the male sex alone. To cling to this outworn notion that occupation should be sex related is an expensive luxury in the face of the present shortages.

Although Hawkes continued in her position one additional year when

Gunstone resigned to continue her degree program, her temporary status,

her position as dean of students rather than academic dean, and the

fact that Dow was preparing to re tire as president in 1965, mitigated

Hawkes' influence on the educational direction at Cottey.

Dow was a charismatic leader with an id ealistic educational pro­

gram in which her audiences wanted to believe. It was comforting and

flatterin g to think Cottey women would graduate with refined, c u lti­

vated tastes and bright, finely honed minds. But other than Hawkes,

neither Dow nor anyone else asked what harvests the cultivated tastes

would reap. Dow's liberal arts idealism prevented her from acknow­

ledging and responding to the problems women faced. Cottey students

graduated with a strong liberal arts education which taught them that

there was no sex in education and thereby denied their experiences

since birth; an education which placed on them great expectations for

contributions to humanity but gave them no educational tools to use in

dealing with the discriminations they would face. By the end of Dow's

term, women had lost the best of both worlds--they tried to live the

myth of Victorian womanhood in the twentieth century context but were

overwhelmed with the Blackstonian principle which robbed them of their

autonomy. 177

Men's cultural values replaced women's cultural values at Cottey

College because, in part, after 1938 the presidents failed to maintain women's values. Mitchell's and Dow's conversion of the curriculum to

pure liberal arts which educated women in everything but prepared them

for nothing, certainly helped to obfuscate the purpose of women's

education--and thus women's cultural values--at Cottey. In addition,

the two presidents successively incorporated men into the faculty and

the administration, a policy which placed men in positions to impose

their cultural values on the routine operations as well as the policy

decisions of the college.

Mitchell initiated the cultural transition from women's to men's

values with two related organizational reforms later perpetuated by

Dow. She established professional rank for faculty members, and she

hired men to faculty positions. Cottey faculty needed rank, she con­

tended, because their organization was similar to four year

institutions, and faculty rank would facilitate a satisfactory salary

and tenure plan.^^ I t was not until 1945, however, that the board of

trustees established rank for faculty.Mitchell convinced them that

rank would recognize individual faculty members' years of successful

teaching at Cottey. Because the Cottey faculty was such a small and

intimate group, rank would help establish some distinctions among them

as well as establish an understanding of authority and responsibility.

She saw rank as a means of enabling only the most experienced faculty

to participate in faculty governance, apparently determining that

only ranks above that of instructor should have a vote in governance 178 matters. And, fin a lly , she said that i t would enable the women on the faculty to achieve professional recognition. "Women labor under great handicaps in attaining such rank in most institutions. We are frankly a woman's institution. I should like to have Cottey a place where a woman can earn both a decent living and a professorial recog­ nition."^^

Proffering professional status and recognition to her women

faculty members by conferring rank upon them, Mitchell undermined

that gesture unwittingly the following year when she convinced the

board of trustees to hire men onto the faculty. Addition of men to

the Cottey faculty had the greatest long term effect of any change

Mitchell made. As early as her second year on campus she asked her

board of trustees, "Shall we in the future consider men applicants for

teaching positions? We have many inquiries. I think we should be 72 thinking on this question." Two years later she hired two men in

part-time positions on the music faculty. Each of the men spent one

day a week on campus and received $700 compensation, a high salary

when compared with full-tim e women faculty whose salaries ranged from

$1300 to $1850.^^ Finally, in 1945, the board authorized M itchell, "to

secure suitable men as needed in the faculty. . . 'in the fields of

mathematics, music, and the exact sciences, and in other departments

only i f authorized by the Board.Mitchell explained to her faculty

members that some board members opposed hiring men.

Dr. /Spencer A^7 Larsen said that there were plenty of small schools throughout the country with mediocre men teachers. Since this is a woman's school, we 179

should have fine jobs for women. This should be a school where a woman teacher can have a future, for i t is very d iffic u lt for a woman to get a really good teaching job on the college level. Also, he feels that the world needs more influence ofrWomen's qualities. The whole Board agreed with him.

In 1948, however, Larsen failed to pursuade his fellow trustees and the board rescinded its action of 1946 lim iting the number of male teachers on the faculty.The post-war era brought many men to the

Cottey faculty.

The decision by the board of trustees to admit men to Cottey's faculty and administration undermined the status of women faculty mem­ bers and administrators and eventually brought a challenge to Dow’s control of college governance. The faculty of 19 included five men when Dow became president in 1949. When she le ft in 1965, however, 17 men and 20 women made up the faculty. Dow also added men to the ad­ ministration. Only women served as administrators when she took office, but by the time she le f t, three men held major administrative posts—the Dean of Faculty, Registrar, and Business Manager, although a woman was Dean of Students and other women held middle management positions as Director of Public Relations and the Director of the

Alumnae Office. Masculinization of Cottey brought several s ig n ifi­ cant changes to the institution. Men soon came to dominate the

higher ranks of the faculty and were paid more than women; faculty minutes reflect, that men tended to dominate most faculty meetings; and

men aggressively sought institutional changes in governance. 180

Preferential treatment in salaries was one area where men bene­

fited over women. Dow, like her predecessors, struggled to find

adequate funds for faculty salaries, but faculty members at Cottey re­ mained grossly underpaid when compared with other institutions in the

country. In 1954, a study by the Council for Financial Aid to Educa­

tion analyzed, in part, the financial picture for 28 nondenominational

women's colleges, and more specifically the Seven College Conference

consisting of Barnard, Bryn Mawr, Mount Holyoke, Radcliffe, Smith,

Vassar, and Wellesley. The study reported that the average faculty

salary in 1953-1954 was $5379 at the Seven College Conference, a

figure considerably higher than the average for a ll of the 28 women's

colleges in the study, $4529.^^ At Cottey in the same year, faculty

70 salaries averaged $3340.

The Council's study made no comparison of men and women's faculty

salaries. At Cottey, however, men with qualifications similar to

those of the women faculty received higher salaries when they were

hired. In 1953, Dow hired seven faculty members, a ll of whom had

earned master's degrees. Of the four men hired, one received a salary

of $2800, two received $3000, and one received $3200. All of the

women received salaries of $2800. This trend continued throughout

Dow's administration. Not only were her faculty paid less than faculty

at other women's colleges, but she paid her women faculty less than

the men.

Within five-and-one-half years of her inauguration, noticeable

conflict between faculty and president emerged. But it was male 181 faculty members rather than the lower-paid women who took leadership in the struggle, and the issues centered on governance rather than salaries. In the spring of 1953, the Faculty Committee requested clarification of college policy on a number of issues which were to plague Cottey presidents for decades to come. The committee asked for an explanation of methods by which faculty members could comment upon and help establish college policy and procedures for hiring, promoting, granting tenure, renewing and non-renewing faculty members, as well as procedures for dismission tenured faculty members. Further, the committee wanted cla rifica tio n of sabbatical and leave of absence policies, a statement of the exact contractual nature of the faculty member's association with the college, a statement on teaching load specifying maximum lim it, criteria used in evaluating the faculty, and the function and authority of department chairmen. The committee also sought the administration's attitude toward the relationship between faculty and students in extra-curricular or social instances and asked for a policy governing student attendance of classes.

The Faculty Committee's statement summarized issues which agita­ ted faculty members across the nation at an escalating rate in the decades to come. At Cottey there is no recorded response to the com­ mittee's statement either by Dow or by other faculty members and the issues lay under the surface of faculty concerns for more than ten years before reemerging. To defuse faculty agitation, however, Dow replaced the Faculty Committee with the Administrative Committee which included only one faculty member elected by the faculty. By 1964, 182 however, on the eve of her retirement from the college, conflict be­ tween faculty and Dow resurfaced. Dow attributed the problems to the

Cottey Chapter of the American Association of University Professors.

Although th irty years earlier she helped charter the local AAUP chapter at Northwest Missouri State Teachers College and subsequently held a state office in the Association, now as president of Cottey

College she fe lt threatened when her own faculty organized a chapter.

She explained the situation to her board of trustees a year later.

Sheltered as i t is in many ways, the Cottey campus is not unaffected by the winds of change. Students and faculty react to what is going on in other college situations.

You w ill remember that Dr. Edward Allen^ retired pro­ fessor of mathematics from Ames, [lomj came in February 1964, to f i l l the place of Dr. Strasser on sabbatic leave in Australia, February 1, 1964-February 1, 1965. Dr. Allen was unduly interested in everything at Cottey College and proceeded to participate in everything. His insistence on the organization of a chapter of the American Association of University Professors among this small faculty created at least a temporary cleavage in i t , and for a time we had a group of new instructors who had perhaps not yet fin ­ ished one semester of college teaching, among whom some had failed to complete by August, 1964, require­ ments for the M. A. degree, basis for their appointment, demanding privileges and, particularly participation in college management,i.e. vote on academic matters, budget, salary scale, travel allowance, etc.

Dr. Allen has gone—but the AAUP chapter regains a l­ though the controversy is no longer heated.

As a gesture of good w ill to the faculty and as an attempt to prevent further faculty agitation, the board accepted Dow's request to adopt the 1940 AAUP Statement on Academic Freedom and Tenure and to publish i t in the faculty handbook. " It would be a clarificatio n of 183 policy" Dow said, "and would strengthen the good relationship between 81 instructional staff and administration,"

Organization of the AAUP chapter, however, imbued faculty members with an interest in expanding their role beyond the classroom into

administrative decision-making areas. At the regular faculty meeting,

January 14, 1965, Ernest Salter, Assistant Professor of Chemistry and

Physics, discussed the faculty's role in the anticipated expansion of

Cottey to 500 students. " It seems to me," he said,

that the only way to have a faculty which does more than teach is to have it take interest in the total academic program, all its phases, its problems, its headaches, without exception. No portion of this faculty stands alone; we are either educators or teachers.

I do not think the problems of expansion w ill be to tally solved by the faculty or any other group, singly. But the problems w ill be far worse i f not worked upon by the faculty.

Later in the same meeting David Goering, Instructor in Biology, sug­

gested that the faculty study what he called the situation of the

faculty member in his fir s t year; "1) the denial to him of voting p ri­

vileges, 2) of receiving compensation to attend professional meetings,

3) to receive incentive pay for continuing study, 4) to be provided 83 college housing." Goering also advocated that faculty members be

provided adequately equipped offices and that the maintenance de­

partment be made more responsive to faculty requests. Following his

speech, Joseph Sunthimer, Assistant Professor of Chemistry, made a 84 motion incorporating Goering's points. Sunthimer's motion, however,

was tabled by motion of Sarah Stevenson of the English faculty. 184

Salter, Goering and Sunthimer's efforts were not without results.

An Administrative Committee meeting soon recommended that the faculty establish five ^ ho£ committees on the status of fir s t year faculty and s ta ff, faculty meetings, faculty load, advising, and the reading 85 program. A special faculty meeting held in early February upon the

petition of several faculty members established these five committees.

The three faculty agitators were not placated, however. In the

exchange between faculty members and Dow which followed adoption of

the committees, the president held her ground but i t was evident that

some faculty members wanted greater power. Immediately after the

faculty approved creation of the five ad hoc committees, Salter

moved that committees on maintenance and on salary schedule also be

appointed. Dow responded that "under the present Constitution and

Bylaws of the faculty neither maintenance or salary schedule came

within the province of the faculty. She emphasized the freedom which

any member of the faculty or s ta ff might have in reporting to or dis­

cussing with the responsible persons questions related to either.

Salter next moved for appointment of a committee on the faculty consti­

tution and handbook. Dow parried this motion with a reference to the

faculty's own organization. She reminded them "that the local chapter

of AAUP had already undertaken a study of the Constitution and Hand­

book, and that a report with recommendations for changes was in 87 process." Salter's motion failed. For the remainder of the 1964-

1965 academic year faculty energy was absorbed in studies by the newly

appointed ^ hoc committees. The gesture of appointing committees 185 defused the situation and no policy changes were made.

The above contest between Dow and her faculty is significant be­ cause i t marks the beginning of faculty struggle for power, i t illustrates the dynamics of that struggle led by the Salter-Goering-

Sunthimer team, and i t further illustrates the goals at which faculty members aimed. Even more important, the contest between faculty and

Dow marks the triumph of men's cultural values at Cottey. From this point onward, i t was male faculty and administrators who argued issues and set policy.

When Dow retired in 1965 she was succeeded by Ted McCarrel, the chairperson of the board of trustees who had headed the presidential

search committee. McCarrel held the registrar's post at the Univer­ sity of Iowa before becoming president of Cottey. He had earned a

bachelor's degree in 1931 from Western Illin o is University and a master's degree in 1936 from the University of Missouri. He was grant­

ed an honorary D. Ed. degree from Parsons College in 1965 shortly QO before becoming president of Cottey. McCarrel's election to the

Cottey presidency effectively marked the end of women's cultural

dominance at the college. NOTES FOR CHAPTER V

1. The University of Iowa Alumni Association (Jean Erickson), letter, 26 March 1980, to the author; Albert Nelson Marquis, Ed., Who's Who in America, Vol. 17, 1932-1933, (Chicago: The A. N. Marquis Company, 1932), p. 1882.

2. "News from Cottey College," P^. E^. 0. Record, 41:8 (August 1929), p. 25; University of Iowa Alumni Association, le tte r; Robert C. Cook, Ed., Presidents of American Colleges and Universities, (New York: The Robert C. Cook Company, 1933), p. 183.

3. Mary Rose Prosser, "A Study of the Scholastic Performance of Fresh­ man Women at the State University of Iowa, 1927-1928," University of Iowa Studies in Education, V: 2 (March 1930), pp. 9-10, 12, 54-59, 60-61.

4. "Dr. Mary Rose Prosser," £. E. 0. Record 59: 8 (August 1947), p. 4; Faculty Minutes, 2 March 1933, "Faculty Minutes, 1931-1932, 1932- 1933," Record Group 3, CCA.

5. Jacques Cattail and E. E. Ross, Eds., Leaders in Education: A Bio­ graphical Directory (Lancaster, Pennsylvania: The Science Press, 1948), p. 99.

6. United States, Department of the In terio r, Census Division, Ab­ stract of the Eleventh Census: 1890, Second edition, (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1896), p. 37.

7. "Florence E. Boehmer, Ph.D., President of Cottey College," P^. £. 0^. Record 45: 8 (August 1933), p. 16; Cattail and Ross, Leaders, p. 99.

8. "Florence E. Boehmer, Ph. D."; Cattell and Ross, Leaders, p. 99.

9. "Florence E. Boehmer, Ph. D.," p. 17; Florence E. Boehmer, "Staying on the Job: A Study of Vocational Continuity of College Women," pp. 93-196 in After College—What? Ed. Chase Going Woodhouse. In s ti­ tute of Women's Professional Relations, Bulletin No. 4, May, 1932, (Greensboro, North Carolina: The North Carolina College for Women, 1932), pp. 97, 101.

10. "Florence E. Boehmer, Ph. D.," p. 16.

186 187

11. "Report of the Chairman of the Board of Trustees of Cottey Col­ lege," 2 ' 1" 0. Record 45: 12 (December 1933), p. 27.

12. "Cottey College Faculty as of October 1951," RG4, CCA.

13. "Orpha Stockard, Ph. D., Acting President of Cottey College," P. E. Record, 49: 7 (July 1937), p. 34.

14. Marjorie M itchell, "Three Features of Timely Interest of the P. E. 0. College," £. £. 0^. Record 50: 11 (November 1938), p. 3.

15. "Dr. Marjorie Mitchell," £. E. 0. Record 60: 1 (January, 1948), p. 10; "Miss Marjorie Mitchell New President of Cottey College," £. E. 0^. Record 50: 6 (June 1938), p. 6.

16. Who's Who in America, Vol. 23, 1944-1945 (Chicago: The A. N. Marquis Company, 1945), p. 1481; "Cottey Junior College," £.E. 0. Record, 52: 1, (January 1940), p. 6; "Dr. Marjorie Mitchell," P. £. 0. Record, 60: 1 (January 1948), p. 10.

17. Who's Who in America, Vol. 23; P. E. 0. Record 52: 1 (January 19407:------

18. 2- i* 0- Record 60: 1 (January 1948).

19. Marjorie M itchell, "Report to the Board of Trustees," March 27-28, 1941, RG2, CCA; Stella Clapp, Out of the Heart: A Century of P. !E. 0 ., 1869-1969, (Des Moines: The P. E. 0. Sisterhood, 1968), p. 242.

20. Marjorie M itchell, "Report to the Board of Trustees," March 27-28, 1941, RG2, CCA.

21. Marjorie M itchëll, "Report to the Board of Trustees of cottey Junior College," March 29-30, 1943, RG2, CCA.

22. Clapp, Out, p. 242.

23. Marjorie M itchell, "Report to the Board of Trustees of Cottey Junior College, 25 March 1946, RG2, CCA.

24. Marjorie M itchell, "Report to the Board of Trustees of Cottey Junior College," 5 December 1948, RG2, CCA.

25. Marjorie M itchell, "Report to the Board of Trustees of Cottey Junior College," 5 December 1948, RG2, CCA.

26. Carrie Ann Reneau Dow, /^Journal of Blanche Hinman Dow, 1894- 1910V Percival DeLuce Memorial Collection, Northwest Missouri State University, Maryville, Missouri, p. 20; Carrie Ann Reneau Dow, 188

/^Autobiography^/, 11 January 1947, Percival DeLuce Memorial Collec­ tion, Northwest Missouri State University, Maryville, Missouri, pp. 44- 45.

27. Dow, /'Autobiography^, p. 1; //Journal^.

28. Mattie M. Dykes, Behind the Birches: A History of Northwest Missouri State College, (Maryville: Northwest Missouri State College, 1956), p. 249.

29. C. H. Oldfather, "President Elect, Cottey Junior College," P^. £. 0. Record, 61: 5 (May 1949), p. 2.

30. Blanche H. Dow, The Varying Attitudes Toward Women in French L it­ erature of the Fifteenth Century: The Opening Years, (New York: Institute of French Studies, Inc., 1936).

31. Blanche H. Dow, "American One-Night Stands: Irun," reprinted from The Overland as_"31anche H. Dow Writes on Spaijn for Magazine," in The Northwest /Missouri SJtate Teachers College/ Missourian, 5 May 1931; Maryville /Missouri/ Daily Forum, 11 April 1975, p. 1.

32. "Student Welfare: Religious Life," Cottey College Bulletin, 26 (April 1933), p. 22.

33. "Faculty Minutes, 1931-1932, 1932-1933," RG3, CCA.

34. Mary Rose Prosser, "Four Years of Progress," P. E. 0. Record, 45: 7, (July 1933), p. 16.

35. Prosser, "Four Years of Progress," p. 16.

36. 2- i - 0* Record 46: 11 (November 1934), p. 22. Irion's address, "Looking Forward," was delivered October 6, 1934.

37. £. £. 0. Record 46: 11 (November 1934), p. 23.

38. £. £. 0. Record 46: 11 (November 1934), p. 23.

39. £. £. 0. Record 46: 11 (November 1934), p. 24.

40. Florence E. Boehmer, "Cottey's Program of Development," I P . £. 0. Record, 45: 11 (November 1933), p. 8.

41. Florence E. Boehmer, "Goals of Education," JP. £. £. Record 47: 2 (February 1935), p. 10.

42. Florence E. Boehmer, "Goals of College Education," £. £. 0. Record 47: 3 (March 1935), pp. 11-12. 189

43. Florence E. Boehmer, "Some Generalities about College Education," R. 0. Record, 49: 4 (April 1937), p. 4.

44. Florence E. Boehmer, "Some Generalizations about CollegeEduca­ tion," £. E. 0. Record 49: 3 (March 1937), p. 7.

45. Florence E. Boehmer, "Some Generalizations," p. 7.

46. Marjorie M itchell, "Cottey College as a P. E. 0. Project,"E. P^. 0. Record 50: 10 (October 1938), p. 3.

47. Mitchell, "Cottey College as a P. E. 0. Project," p. 3.

48. Marjorie Mitchell, "Report to Board of Trustees," March 28-29, 1940, RG2, CCA.

49. Carin Degermark, "The Health Program at Cottey College," £. £. 0^. Record 54: 7 (July 1942), pp. 21-22.

50. Marjorie M itchell, "Report to the Board of Trustees of Cottey College," October 26, 1947, RG2, CCA.

51. Floella Farley, "Music for All at Cottey," P^. £. 0. Record 51: 3 (March 1939), p. 15.

52. Marie Davis, "Family Relationships Studied at Cottey College," £. E^. 0. Record 51: 2 (February 1939), pp. 10-11.

53. Davis, "Family Relationships," pp. 10-11.

54. The Feminine Mystique, (New York: Dell Publishing Co., Inc., 1963TTpp. 142-173.

55. Marjorie M itchell, "Address of the President of Cottey College at the Supreme Convention of the P. E. 0. Sisterhood, Los Angeles, California, 6-9 October 1947, RG2, CCA.

56. Mitchell, "Address ..." 6-9 October 1947.

57. "Faculty Minutes, 13 September 1938," in "Faculty Minutes, 1933- 1939," RG3, CCA.

58. Marjorie Mitchell, "What Do You Know about Us?" £. £. 0. Record 61: 3 (March 1949), p. 4.

59. Marjorie Mitchell, "The Cottey Type?" £. £. 0. Record 61: 1 (January 1949), p. 9.

60. "Minutes of the Annual Meeting of the Board of Trustees of Cottey College, Nevada, Missouri, March 24 and 25, 1939," RG2, CCA. 190

61. Marjorie M itchell, "Report to Board of Trustees," March 24, 1939, RG2, CCA.

62. Marjorie Mitchell, "Report to Board of Trustees," March 27-28, 1941; Marjorie M itchell, "Report to Board of Trustees of Cottey Junior College," March 25, 1946; Board Meeting, March 24, 1946; "Minutes of the Board of Trustees, Cottey Junior College," October 27, 1946, RG2 CCA.

63. Harvard Committee, General Education in a Free Society, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1945).

64. Mary R itter Beard, "The Direction of Women's Education," in Ann J. Lane, ed., Mary R itter Beard: A Sourcebook, (New York: Schocken Books, 1977), p. 163.

65. Beard, "Direction," p. 165.

66. Blanche H. Dow, "Building Vital Curricula for Today's College Women," £. IE. 0. Record 66: 6 (June 1954), p. 17.

67. Dow, "Building," p. 17.

68. Anna L. Rose Hawkes, "The Fault, Dear Brutus. . ."P .. £. 0. Rec­ ord 76: 6 (June 1964), p. 9.

69. Marjorie M itchell, "Report to Board of Trustees, 28-29 October 1938, RG2, CCA.

70. Board Meeting, 28 March 1945, RG2, CCA.

71. Marjorie M itchell, "Reoort to Board of Trustees of Cottey Junior College, 28 March 1945, RG2, CCA.

72. Marjorie M itchell, "Report to Board of Trustees," 28-29 March 1940, RG2, CCA.

73. Marjorie M itchell, "Report to Board of Trustees," 27-28 March 1941, RG2, CCA.

74. Board Meeting, 28 March 1945, RG2, CCA.

75. "Faculty Minutes, 1941-1946," 3 April 1945, RG3, CCA.

76. "Minutes of the Board of Trustees, Cottey Junior College for Women," 30 March 1948, RG2, CCA.

77. John A. Pol land, "Costly Thy Habit. . . The Financial Status of Women's Colleges," Journal of the American Association of University Women, 49: 2 (January 1956), p. 9. 191

78. Compiled from "Salary Study and Recommendations," "Report to the Board of Trustees," 14, 15 March 1958, RG2, CCA.

79. "Faculty Minutes, 1953-1958," Spring, 1953, RG3, CCA.

80. Report to the Cottey College Board of Trustees, 12, 13 March 1965, RG2, CCA.

81. Report to the Cottey College Board of Trustees, 12, 13 March 1965.

82. "Faculty Minutes, 1964-1965," 14 January 1965, RG4, CCA.

83. "Faculty Minutes, 1964-1965," 14 January 1965.

84. "Faculty Minutes, 1964-1965," 14 January 1965.

85. John A. Caylor, Dean of Faculty,Cottey College, Nevada, Missouri, 26 January 1965, le tte r to the faculty, RG4, CCA.

86. "Administrative Committee, 1964-1965," Faculty Minutes, 3 February 1965, RG4, CCA.

87. "Administrative Committee, 1964-1965," Faculty Minutes, 3 February 1965.

88. Robert C. Cook, Ed., Presidents and Deans of American Colleges and Universities, 1966-67, (Nashville: Who's Who in American Education, Inc., 1966), p. 334. CHAPTER VI

CONCLUSION: WHY WOMEN'S CULTURE DECLINED AT COTTEY COLLEGE

Modern feminism--women' s consciousness of themselves as women, as separate social beings whose cultureal values and interests differed from those of men--developed in the nineteenth century from earlier im­ planted roots. Feminism resulted from factors in the larger environment as well as from factors within women's personal environ­ ments. The progress of industrialization and economic expansion in the larger environment brought changes in social classes and gender roles.

Functions and activities designated for women became more limited in scope, fewer occupations outside the home were open to women, and women's sphere became more sharply distinguished from men's sphere.^

Separation of women from men in their distinctive spheres enabled women to liv e most of their lives within their personal environments which consisted largely of women. I t was within this homosocial world that women developed their consciousness of themselves as women.

From this consciousness, or feminism, women developed their own culture founded on woman-identified values. The values most clearly associa­ ted with women's culture are woman's autonomy and the value of human lif e . Women's culture was expressed in three theatres: 1) the envi­ ronment immediate to the individual in which women adopted modes of behavior which enabled them to cope with or to celebrate their

192 193 surroundings or to survive from day to day; 2) the environment beyond women's sphere to which women extended their influence through humanistic melioration of existing conditions; and 3) women's insti­ tutions in which women defined and shaped the environment according to their values and principles.

Women actively engaged their values in a ll three cultural theatres. From their activism, however, women developed two schools of thought concerning expression of their cultural values, and in this lay the feminist dilemma--"whether to assert female influence as a function of th eir difference from men, or on the basis of their 2 equality." On the one hand, some women preferred to confine their cultural athleticism within women's sphere by limiting interaction with the dominant culture of male values and attempting, instead, to make women's homosocial world more comfortable and acceptable for women. The P. E. 0. Sisterhood was one organization which chose this approach. Women who chose this cultural approach w ill be referred to in which discussion as homosocialists. Other women, on the other hand, organized to contest the dominant culture and to seek a parity for women within its institutions. Women who chose this cultural approach w ill be referred to in this discussion as integrationists. Although their manner of exercising their values differed, and although women sometimes neatedly debated those differences, they remained united on the basic values of women's autonomy and the value of human lif e .

Within this context of an active women's culture, Virginia Alice

Cottey Stockard founded Cottey College as a women's institution. Her 194 college perpetuated the nineteenth century women's cultural values of autonomy and the value of human lif e . She promoted women's autonomy by educating women for self-sufficiency after college, and she pro­ moted the value of human lif e by teaching women moral values based on

religious principles and by encouraging women to become teachers or missionaries.

In some respects Cottey College contrasted with eastern women's

colleges founded during the same period. Many of the eastern colleges were integrationists. They attempted to duplicate men's colleges in

curriculum and the education which their students received so that

their graduates might join the society of educated people on a basis

of parity. Their plan failed to bring women immediate and large scale

benefits, however, for th eir graduates faced numerous and great bar­

riers in their struggle to be accepted among the educated class.

Educated women came face to face with professions and occupations which

were closed to them because they were women. They discovered that

gender, not education and capability, was the measure of success in the

American mythology of rugged individualism. The new collegiate women

responded to these barriers with new organizations to support their

claims as educated people. The Association of Collegiate Alumnae,

founded in 1882, undertook studies of college-educated women which

proved that education did not disrupt their womanly functions. The

ACA also established fellowships offering financial support to women

in graduate and professional schools. 195

In contrast to eastern women's colleges and organizations like the ACA, Stockard shaped Cottey College to educate her students for what she envisioned as exalted womanhood which accepted the Victorian definition of woman's sphere. She was a homosocialist who believed that within their sphere women enjoyed a broad 1 attitude in which to influence the larger world. She designed the curriculum to teach students the liberal arts and the religious foundations of women's culture. God had chosen women, she believed, to moderate the harsh­ ness of men's society. This could best be done through preparing women for teaching, missionary work and creating wholesome homes.

Rather than striving for the same education provided by men's in stitu ­ tions, Stockard shaped her institution to fu lfill Victorian women's needs as she understood them. In purpose, structure and function

Cottey College expressed women's cultural values.

The decline of women's culture at Cottey College came only after

Stockard retired from the presidency and relinquished control to the

P. E. 0. Sisterhood. The Sisterhood hired professional educators to administer the college. I t was the four women presidents who ad­ ministered Cottey from 1929 to 1965 who, through policy and precept,

gradually compromised with or accepted male values of the dominant culture

Mary Rose Prosser, the fir s t president hired for Cottey by the

P. E. O.'s continued operations as near as possible to the manner in

which Stockard administered the college. Facing the depression and

declining enrollments, however, i t was a ll Prosser could do to keep 196

the college open. Even then the board of trustees closed the academy at the end of her last year as president. Preoccupied with institu­

tional survival Prosser made no significant changes in the college

program as i t expressed women's culture.

Florence Boehmer, who succeeded Prosser in 1933, was a woman of

vision and energy. With her direction, the enrollment decline was

reversed and the college received increasing support from the P. E. 0.

Sisterhood. Boehmer's administration spanned a transitional period in

which Cottey attempted to adjust to women's new roles, occupations and

activities. The transition of women in American society from nine­

teenth to twentieth century standards w ill be discussed here in some

detail to c la rify the environment in which Boehmer administered the

college.

Women's activity patterns altered significantly between 1890 and

the 1920s. Urban living in particular created an environment for a

revolution in manners and morals which included, for women, "their

introductory exhibition of fashions, hair styles, dances, cosmetics, 3 smoking, and drinking." The changes in women's lives became most

noticeable after 1910, and after the First World War the contrast of

women's lives with Victorian women le ft little doubt that major social

changes had occurred. "The twenties marked the solidification of a

new pattern of female roles characterized by a dynamic equilibrium 4 between work, home, and consumer activities ." 197

At the same time that women's activity patterns changed, oppori- tion to that change arose.

The period 1890 to 1920 saw a concerted male attack upon the legitimacy of this world of female id e n tifi­ cation and solidarity, an attack abetted by economic and demographic changes which undermined female in s ti­ tutional structures. By the 1920s and 1930s, the ,, community of self-defined, autonomous women had become the subject of derision and ridicule, denigrated a lte r­ natively as lesbian, sexually repressive, and old-fashioned.

Opposition to women's activities took many forms, and as i t broadened across society i t became d iffic u lt to distinguish from the opposition to women merely because of their gender. In the 1920s—

Feminist organizations and leaders were battered by charges of being agents or dupes of a Bolshevist con­ spiracy to conquer the United States. Anti-feminists, extreme conservatives, open-shop advocates, anti-paci­ fis ts , and patriotic groups made such accusations against organizations as diverse as the Women's Trade Union League, League of Women Voters, American Associa­ tion of University Women, YWCA, and Women's Christian Temperance Union. All were denounced as partgOf a "Spider Web" to promote communist objectives.

Opponents attacked women and women's integrationist organizations which appeared to threaten the status quo of male dominance, not only

as communist dupes but as neurotics, masochists, sadists and homo- 7 sexual s.

Economically the United States became a consumer society in the

1920s. The new field of advertising which quickly realized it could

use women's physical attributes to lure men to various consumer pro­

ducts, helped create the definition of women as primarily physical

objects. Advertisers used women as sexy salesladies, "entailing a 198 provocative new model of femininity and symbolizing new patterns of

O behavior in both private relations and the public marketplace."

Men's objectification of women in this manner made their opposition to and suppression of women's social changes easier.

'.(omen's higher education consolidated the issues surrounding changing roles and ac tivities for women and the opposition to those changes. In the nineteenth century, "the radical challenge. . . of the movement for higher education, was to the structure of gender roles.

Colleges socialized their students for future roles, and women's col­ leges which adopted curricula from men's colleges directly challenged the gender structure by threatening to incorporate women into the same strata and occupations as educated men. E. H. Clarke and others de­ veloped elaborate rationale why education was physically unsafe for women and ultimately for the procreation of the race.

Thus, women's education which would better enable women to define themselves, to exercise their autonomy, appeared to many as a serious threat to social s ta b ility and welfare. By the 1920s and 1930s, how­ ever, education for women found general, i f grudging, acceptance as a social re a lity . Other pressures now came to bear on women's educa­

tional institutions as women's colleges attempted to make their

educational programs relevant to contemporary women's needs. Early women graduates had faced great barriers in finding suitable occupa­

tions in which they could apply th eir education. In addition, women's

changing economic and social roles, by implication, challenged the

Victorian sphere of womanhood and pushed more women to im plicitly or 199 e x p licitly challenge the dominant culture. New definitions were needed for women's nature and their socially acceptable gender roles.

Some educators revised Victorian era curricula in the 1920s by adopting programs which would prepare women for marriage and the home.

As early as 1913 "Ethel Puffer Howe. . . urged women's colleges. . . to develop courses in domestic science, eugenics, hygiene, and the aesthe­ tics of the home in order to train women for the domestic tasks which 10 I ay ahead." In 1924, Vassar College introduced home economics--then termed, euthenics--into the curriculum. Euthenics was ju stified as a means for upgrading women's skills and expertise in their traditional sphere. "In this addition," however, lay the clear admission that the notion that men and women could and should be educated in a like manner had been afailure.Other institutions also adopted home economics curricula and thus turned from an integrationist approach for women's education back to the homosocial ideal.

The external forces which altered women's roles and activities in

the twentieth century affected Cottey women as they did women else­ where in the country. At Cottey, however, Boehmer faced a different

set of internal circumstances than were found in other institutions.

She faced the constraints of a small enrollment, meagre budget and the

necessity of pleasing the P. E. 0. Sisterhood which retained its homo­

socialist focus. To build enrollment and financial resources she

appealed to the P. E.O.'s to send their daughters to Cottey. The

strategy succeeded but it also tied Boehmer closer in her administra­

tive decisions to P. E. 0. values. Boehmer, like other women's college 200 administrators, incorporated home economics into the curriculum. By doing so she hoped to accomplish two things; the college would educate women for traditional female roles which would satisfy homosocialists, but at the same time the home economics curriculum could be used by students who so desired to prepare for careers outside the home which would satisfy the integrationists.

Marjorie Mitchell eliminated academic emphasis on home economics and secretarial studies when she realized a declining student interest in the subjects. Instead, Mitchell, and later Blanche Dow, molded

Cottey's curriculum around the liberal arts. Although Cottey never had been considered a Victorian finishing school, dominance of the liberal arts program in the 1940s-1960s created a twentieth century equivalent of finishing schools. Students developed capabilities in music, art, languages and other liberal arts subjects, but unlike curricula for men in other institutions the Cottey program prepared its graduates for no particular lif e course. For Mitchell and Dow, liberal arts were enough. But women increasingly were entering the economic sphere of the dominant culture and Cottey students, facing a highly competitive world after college, needed more than the profound generalities of liberal arts.

Boehmer, Mitchell and Dow all accepted the traditional American

faith in education as the only road to success and progress. In

their own lives they had worked hard for their education, but as Mary

R itter Beard said of their generation, "they too lig htly accepted as

education the body of knowledge and the developing doctrines which the 201 masters of those institutions deemed to be education in its fulness"-- they cut loose from their own vast heritage of knowledge, experience, 12 and thought. They lost their bearings as women. The feminist consciousness and women's cultural values which inspired Stockard to create her in stitutio n, by 1965 were subverted and a ll but forgotten.

Cottey, lik e other colleges, failed to perpetuate an educational program equal to that of men's colleges, or to develop an educational program which would meet women's needs in the twentieth century. Suc- cesive administrators vacillated on the appropriate curriculum to offer and developed no consistent policy. At Vassar College,the failure came in 1924 with adoption of the home economics curriculum which

turned women back to the home. At Cornell University's Sage College,

the failure came in 1884 when, for economic reasons, the administra­

tion required women students to live in college housing, thereby

creating a double standard of expectations and regulations for women

and men students. Rather than achieving integration, the inequality

for women continued into the twentieth century when, "Cornell Univer­

sity had become by 1960 a place where women had the least possibility 1 8 for equal opportunity."

Rather than facing twentieth century economic realities and pre­

paring women to integrate into the dominant culture, colleges used

their institutional resources to restrict women to their traditional

homosocial world. Women's nineteenth century homosocial world, how­

ever, was no more. The same economic forces which pulled women out

of the home to find work also rearranged society in such a way that 202 the "female world of love'and ritu al" no longer existed. By the mid­ twentieth century, many women who stayed at home were lonely, isolated and bored. Collegeeducation only seemed to intensify these symptoms.

The decline of women's culture at Cottey College f i t into the national pattern of women's colleges since the 1870s. In 1870, 12 per­ cent of a ll colleges in the United States were women's colleges. In

1890 the proportion was 10 percent, but by 1970 only 8 percent of a ll colleges were women's colleges. "The decline of women's colleges has been accompanied by a decline in occupational opportunity for women in higher education" found in an increasing salary differen tial for women and men, a diminished number of women top-level administrators, a de­ clining proportion of women on faculties and administration and a declining proportion of women in tenuted ranks.Cottey College dis­ played a ll of these symptoms. But even more, however, Cottey represented the failure of women's culture--the fa ilu re of women- identified-women to maintain the integrity of their values in the face of social change. NOTES FOR CHAPTER VI

1. L illia n Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love between Women from the Renaissance to the Present, (New York: WTTliam Morrow and Company, Tnc"., 1981), pp.“T8ïFTBTr

2. Kathryn Kish Sklar, Catharine Beecher: A Study in Domesticity, (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, Inc., 1973]",p. 137.

3. James R. McGovern, "The American Woman's Pre-World War I Freedom in Manners and Morals," in Jean E. Friedman and William G. Shade, Eds., Our American Sisters: Women in American Life and Thought, 2nd edition, TBoston: Allyn and Bacon, In c ., 1976), p. 357.

4. Mary P. Ryan, "The Projection of a New Womanhood: The Movie- Moderns in the 1920s," in Friedman and Shade, Our American Sisters, p. 383.

5. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, "Politics and Culture in Women's History," Feminist Studies 6: 1 (Spring 1980), p. 63.

6. J. Stanley Lemons, The Woman Citizen: Social Feminism in the 1920s, (Urbana: University of Illin o is Press, 1973), p. 209.

7. Mary P. Ryan, Womanhood in America: From Colonial Times to the Present, (New York: New Viewpoints, 1975), p. 276.

8. Ryan, Womanhood, p. 260.

9. Joan N. Burstyn, Victorian Education and the Ideal of Womanhood, (Totowa, New Jersey: Barnes and Noble Books, 1980), p. 167.

10. William Henry Chafe, The American Woman: Her Changing Social, Economic, and Political Roles, 1920-1970, (London: Oxford University Press, 197277 p. 103.

11. Debra Herman, "Victims of Equal Education: On the Failure of the Vassar Experiment in Women's Education," unpublished paper read at the Fifth Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Vassar College, June 1981.

203 204

12. Mary R itter Board, "Directions of Women's Education, The," in Ann J. Lane, Ed., Mary R itter Beard: A Sourcebook, (New York: Schocken Books, 1977), p. 163.

13. Charlotte Williams Conable, Women at Cornell: The Myth of Equal Education, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977yr"p. 132.

14. Marion Kilson, "The Status of Women in Higher Education," Signs 1: 4 (Summer 1976), pp. 936-937. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Sources

Manuscripts

Record Group 2, Records of the Board of Trustees, Cottey College Archives (CCA).

Record Group 3, Records of the Office of the President, CCA.

Record Group 4, Records of the Office of the Dean, CCA.

Records of the Student Council for 1938-1941, CCA.

Cottey College Chronicle, CCA.

Cottey Junior College Catalogues, CCA.

Records on f ile in the Cottey College Alumnae Office.

Dow, Carrie Ann Reneau, /^"AutobiographyV, 11 January 1947, Percival DeLuce Memorial Collection, Northwest Missouri State University, Maryville, Missouri.

______, /"Journal of Blanche Hinman Dow, 1894-1910"7 Percival DeLuce Memorial Collection, Northwest Missouri State University, Maryville, Missouri.

Personal correspondence

University of Iowa Alumni Association, The, (Jean Erickson), letter, 26 March 1980, to the author.

Oral interviews

Gray, Dr. Miriam, Nevada, Missouri, Oral history interview with Adele Ausink at Cottey College, Nevada, Missouri, 7 November 1979.

Homes, N ellie, personal interview with the author, Nevada, Missouri 5 February 1980. 205 206

Published public documents

U. S. Department of Commerce, Fifteenth Census of the United States: 1930. Vol. I, Population: Number and Distribution of Inhabitants. Washington: U. S. Government Printing Office, 1931.

U. S. Department of the In terio r, Census Division. Abstract of the Eleventh Census: 1890, Second edition. Washington: Government Print­ ing Office, 1896.

. Census Office. Abstract of the Twelfth Census of the United States: 1900. Washington: U. S. Government Printing Office, 1902.

Compendium of the Tenth Census of the United States: 1880. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1883.

Newspapers

Mountain Grove (Missouri) Journal.

Nevada (Missouri) Daily Mail.

Books, artic les , book reviews

B issell, Mary T ., M. D., "Emotions Versus Health in Women," The Popular Science Monthly, 32 (February 1888).

Boehmer, Florence E ., "Commencement at Cottey College," 2- i * 0. Record 46: 7 (July 1934).

______, "Cottey's Program of Development," £. £. 0. Record 45: 11 (November 1933).

, "Goals of College Education," P. E. 0. Record 47: 3 (March 1935).

_ , "Goals of Education," K £. 0. Record 47: 2 (Febru- ary, 1935),

, "President, Cottey College, Report to Supreme Con­ vention," IP. E. 0. Record 47: 10 (October 1935).

, "Some Generalities about College Education," P^.E. 0. Record 49: 4 (April 1937).

, "Some Generalizations about College Education," P^. £. 0^. Record 49: 3 (March 1937) 207

______J "Staying on the Job: A Study of Vocational Continuity of College Women," pp. 93-196 in After College-- What? Ed Chase Going Woodhouse. Institute of Women's Professional Relations, Bulletin No. 4, May, 1932. Greensboro, North Carolina: The North Carolina College for Women, 1932.

Bryn Mawr College: Twenty-Fifth Anniversary. N.p.: orivately orinted, 1910.

Campbell, Elizabeth McClure, "A Teacher Looks at Cottey," P^. JE. 0. Record, 45: 10 (October 1933).

Celebration of the Quarter-Century of Smith College. Cambridge: The Riverside Press, 1900.

Clarke, Edward H., M. D. Sex in Education, or A Fair Chance for G irls. Boston: James R. Osgood and Company, 1874.

Clouston, T. S., M. D., "Female Education from a Medical Point of View," The Popular Science Monthly, 24 (December 1883).

______, "Female Education from a Medical Point of View," The Popular Science Monthly, 24 (January 1884).

"Cottey Junior College," £. IE. 0. Record, 52: 1 (January 1940).

/Cottey, Rose M^/R. M. C. "In Memoriam," Cottey College Chronicle, 6: 2 (January 1897).

Dewey, John, "Education and the Health of Women," Science Supplement 6: 141 (October 16, 1885).

"Health and Sex in Higher Education," The Popular Science Monthly, 23 (March 1886).

Dinwiddie, A. G. Cottey College Chronicle, 3: 9 (June 1894).

Dow, Blanche H. "American One-Night Stands: Irun," reprinted from The Overland as_"Blanche H. Dow Writes on Spaiji for Magazine," in The Northwest /Missouri State Teachers Colleg^/ Missourian, 5 May 1931.

_, "Building Vital Curricula for Today's College Women," £. £. 0. Record, 66: 6 (June 1954).

_ , The Varying Attitudes Toward Women in French Litera­ ture of the Fifteenth Century: The Opening Years. New York: Institute of French Studies, In c., 1936.

"Dr. Marjorie Mitchell," £. £. 0. Record, 60: 1 (January 1948). 208

"Education of Women, The," Harper's New Monthly Magazine, 67; 398 (July 1883).

Evans, Addie, "Memories of Cottey College," P^. E. 0. Record, 47: 3 (March 1935).

"Florence E. Boehmer, Ph. D., President of Cottey College," P^. £. 0. Record, 45: 8 (August 1933).

Hall, Lucy M., M. D., "Higher Education of Women and the Family," The Popular Science Monthly, 30 (March 1887).

Heaton, Katherine May, "Founder's Day, 100th Anniversary of Virginia Alice Cottey Stockard," £. _E. 0. Record, 60: 6 (June 1948).

Henely, Louise M. "Report of Board of Trustees of Cottey College," £. L 0. Record, 51: 11 (November 1939).

______, "Report of Board of Trustees, Cottey College," £. E. 0. Record, 53: 10 (October 1941).

Howe, Julia Ward, ed., Sex and Education: A Reply to Dr. L H. Clarke's "Sex in Education." Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1884.

"Illness of Mrs. Stockard," £. £. 0. Record, 47: 2 (February 1935).

Jones, Veda M., "Report of the President of Supreme Chapter, 1939- 1941," P. E. 0. Record, 53: 10 (October 1941).

Lieghley, Helen, "OPening Days at Cottey College," £.E. 0. Record, 50: 11 (November 1938).

Martin, Laura T., "Ideals of P. E.0.," P. E. 0. Record, 66: 3 (March 1954).

"Membership Summary by Biennium," P. E. 0. Record, 59: 11 (November 1947).

Mitchell, Marjorie, "Cottey College as a P. E. 0. Project," 2- 1- 0. Record, 50: 10 (October 1938).

, "The Cottey Type?" P. E. 0. Record, 61: 1 (January 1949)1

______, "Three Features of Timely Interest of the P. E. 0. College," £. £. 0. Record, 50: 11 (November 1938).

______, "What Do You Know about Us?" £. IE. 0. Record, 61: 3 (March 1949). 209

"P. E. 0. Educational Fund, The," P. E. 0. Record, 58: 9 (September 1946).

Prosser, Mary Rose, "Four Years of Progress," P. E. 0. Record, 45; 7 (July 1933).

_, "Study of the Scholastic Performance of Freshman Women at the State University of Iowa, A, 1927-1928," University of Iowa Studies in Education, 5; 2 (March 1930).

Reeves, Winona Evans, "The International Chapter," £. E. 0. Record, 51: 12, (December 1939).

"Repost of the Chairman of the Board of Trustees of Cottey College," £. £. 0. Record 54: 12 (Decmeber 1933).

/Steger, Clara E./ C. E. S., "Editorial," Cottey College Chronicle, /June 1893/. '

Stockard, Virginia Alice Cottey, "Cottey College," £. £. 0. Record 42: 1 (January 1930).

______, "The Purpose of Cottey," P. E. 0. Record, 44: 3 (March 1932).

"Student Welfare: Religious Life," Cottey College Bulletin, 25 (April 1933).

"Virginia Alice Cottey Stockard," P^. £. 0. Record, 52: 8 (August 1940),

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Farley, Floella, "Music for All at Cottey," £. IE. 0. Record 51: 3 (March 1939).

______, "News from P. E. O.'s Cottey," £. 0. Record 50: 2 (February 1938).

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Lemons, J. Stanley. The Woman Citizen: Social Feminism in the 1920s. Urbana: University of Illin o is Press, 1973.

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. The Grimke Sisters from South Carolina. New York: Schocken Books, 1967.

_ , "The Lady and the Mill G irl: Changes in the Status of Women in the Age of Jackson," reprinted in Gerda Lerner, The Majority Finds Its Past. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979.

_, "New Approaches to the Study of Women in American History," reprinted in Gerda Lerner, The Majority Finds Its Past. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979.

_, "Placing Women in History: Definitions and Challenges," reprinted in Gerda Lerner, The Majority Finds Its Past. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979.

_, "Politics and Culture in Women's History," Feminist Studies 6: 1 (Spring 1980).

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